Definitely Maybe

Well, maybe if I brought up Celine Dion it wouldn't help my point, but I am curious why we humans like music so much? I think of something like music and wonder how we evolved to enjoy it. Maybe in the same ways sex and love came about... but it makes me wonder.

monkenstick

this one stumps me a bit too

Maybe its simply a byproduct of the evolution of human speech. We evolved the ability to detect emotion in eachother's speech from changes in pitch and tone because it confers a survival advantage. We recognise the emotion in others from their speech perhaps because it triggers the same sort of emotion in us (in neuroscience they've found that presentation of fearful faces trigger subconscious fear pathways in the person viewing them) So maybe music simply takes advantage of this emotion detecting system.

you can tell i'm no neuroscientist, but thats my crazy hypothesis

Doubting Didymus

There is the sexual selection theory of human intelligence, but I am currently hesitant to champion that one. I will wait until I have read the mating mind, and get back to that.

Camaban

Communication:

A song is an easier-to-remember and more-difficult-to-distort (accidentally distort) and a memorised song.

Those who were good at it passed on more reliable information, and those who enjoyed it absorbed the information better (actually concentrating on it, and repeating it to themselves)

at least that's one possibility.

Camaban

If you want an example, think of how much easier it is to remember a long song when compared with a straight message of half the length

lpetrich

I've seen speculations that singing is older than "plain" speech, which means that it originally had some function other than the plain-speech function of straight information transmission. But what functions?

One simple function is advertisement of one's presence. That may be the function of cow mooing and sheep baaing; imagine a herd of wild oxen with its members moving to the mooing that they hear.

This is also useful for announcing a claim on territory; male songbirds stake out territory and advertise their claims with their songs; they also advertise themselves to females. Bird songs are species-specific; this helps males to identify which males to watch out for (different species' territories can overlap), and females to identify which males will help them lay fertile eggs that will hatch into strong, healthy offspring.

To a predator, a singing bird has effectively painted a target on himself -- which male birds often do in a very literal sense with bright colors. This can be a form of conspicuous consumption -- a way of saying "I attracted hungry predators -- and won!"

The functions of whale songs are not well-understood, so I won't discuss them.

The species-specificity suggests a reason for specific songs to be learned: group-specificity. Each group having its particular song may indicate to some early hominid which group to travel toward, because another group would give him/her the cold shoulder -- or worse.

This may explain a common taste for group singing -- and why harmony is a common feature of music. Relatively-pretty music, at least.

Harmony comes about when overtones of different notes have close frequencies; this closeness imitates the effect of group singing, since the members of a group will not sing at exactly the same pitch.

Adaptation for singing can even be a form of preadaptation for speech, since OK singing does not require full-scale vocal-tract control -- yet another case of scaffolding for an irreducibly-complex feature.

lpetrich

As to why verse may be easy to remember than straight prose, there is a simple reason: verse forms supply some extra info for inferring what the next words are. Which is the principle of an error-correcting code: include extra info that allows one to correct for occasional incorrect bits --- and infer that a more-corrupted message is nonsense.

lpetrich

Some more thoughts. Rhythm may be necessary as a convenient way of staying in sync; with a suitable rhythm, singers can more easily anticipate when to change pitch or pause.

However, rhythm need not originate as an adaptive response to that circumstance; rhythmic limb motion, body twisting, heart beating, etc. has likely been around since the base of the Cambrian.

And here are some examples of error-detecting and error-correcting code:

Imagine that one wants to send a stream of bits, and that one wants to check on whether that stream has been corrupted. For simplicity, I will construct codes that handle the bits one by one.

The simplest approach is to duplicate the bit. Thus, one finds:

00 - 0
01 -- ambiguous
10 -- ambiguous
11 -- 1

The two in the middle are ambiguous, but it is clear that corruption of one out of two bits can be recognized.

Do the same, with three bits:

000 - 0
001 - 0
010 - 0
011 - 1
100 - 0
101 - 1
110 - 1
111 - 1

Single-bit corruption can not only be detected -- but also corrected! And corrected using a simple rule: majority vote.

bluefugue

monkenstick --

I agree with your comments. I think music comes from speech, as you say varying pitches in language come with emotional associations. I suppose singing and talking might have been simultaneous developments in human culture/biology. A seperate consideration is the human response to rhythm, which I think has quite different origins than our sensitivity to pitch variation.

Music seems so abstract, so independent from humanity, this pure structure of tones that we respond to without thinking about it. But there is also a lot of cultural conditioning going on. We aren't born with an understanding of Western tonality (major/minor scales, chords, etc.): we are indocrinated by hearing a million songs from birth (or even before birth). And Western tonality is in part an ad-hoc creation, cobbled together after centuries of experimentation etc.

excreationist

<a href="http://208.245.156.153/archive/output.cfm?ID=888" target="_blank">Here</a> is a long article from the science magazine "Discover".
I think it answers your question but it is a bit too long for me to read all of it and summarize it for you.