Godless Dave

Why do you think I play guitar?

Hell, that's how birds attract mates.

Jubal

I conjecture that, since music can (as noted) have a mood-altering effect, music may have come, partially, as an aid to mating (it is irrational to assume that a trait would have only one cause or purpose, so I seek to contradict no one). One may note that certain birds may "dance" for prospective mates in a display of aerobatic skill.
It may have been by pure coincidence that humans began this behavior, but the mneumonic recall theory also works in the instance that it was meant as a display of linguistic ability. The mneumonic recall effect may have arisen as a sort of cheat. It follows that those most sensitive to the mood-altering effects of music would recieve mates who used this device. Other effects were probably tacked on as needed. I'm certain that the process of selection could make some of the lesser effects extremely prominent in but a few generations.

To sum it up, I think that music came to work as a mneumonic device as an aid to reciting lines.

MrDarwin

Before we address music we have to address the enormous ability of the human brain to store information, to communicate that information using symbolic language, and to think abstractly. Maybe music is an accidental association between these things, a mere by-product, or maybe it's actually the cause of some of the things that make humans unique.

But I think JB01 is onto something; an ability to retain non-genetic knowledge and information, to pass it down to later generations, has an obvious evolutionary advantage--and music may have been how our ancestors did it.

bluefugue

I had an idea that music was an offspring of speech. Since inflections, variations in pitch and dynamics, etc., carry meaning in language (i.e. the difference between saying "I love you" and "I love you"), I thought music might perhaps be an abstraction of this emotional lexicon. It's not an enormous leap, it seems to me, to go from expressive talking/screaming/moaning/storytelling to singing, and thence to the pure abstraction of instrumental music.

Turtonm's right, though. It's a heck of a conundrum. It's particularly interesting the way certain combinations of tones seem to be inherently more pleasurable than others. This may to some extent be culturally determined, but there does seem to be a connection between certain intervals in Western tonality and physical laws of harmonics. (If you press a note on a piano and lift the dampers off the 3rd, 5th, 10th, etc. above that note, they will automatically resonate in sympathy.) I would also be interested to find out what are the common threads among different tonal systems (including non-Western); i.e. are certain intervals (the fifth, the octave, the third, the sixth) used in all types of music, etc.

liquid

We touched upon this music/physics in my lectures actually. Tying to remember exactly what it was all about. I think that when you set up an oscillation in a substrate like a guitar string or an air pipe, there are only certain multiples of the wavelength that can fit in the geometry as complementary harmonics.

echidna

Random thoughts which I list for starters :

1. Appeal to emotion. That low-brain-function people and some animals respond so well to music would imply that appeal to music is quite basic. I can’t help thinking that lyrics, melody and emphasis can variously be metaphorically associated with any of our emotions from love, anger to sorrow. I’d only guess that since we have a need both to externalise and feel our emotions, music can often be such an outlet. To me it may be another form of our ability to think symbolically. (Damn, just partially plagiarised MrDarwin)

2. Association with experience. Lyrics can be used for story-telling, an important part of socialisation and learning. As such I think music and rhythm are useful as mnemonic aids to learning. A lengthy story can be remembered much easier when it is broken into some form of repetition, whether it be by rhyme, rhythm or structure. Unfortunately this seems to have been also discovered by Marketing Advertisers. However I’d regard this value of musical appreciation to be less basic than its apparent instinctive appeal. (Double damn, just partially plagiarised JB01)

3. Familiarity. There seems to be increased (to a point) liking for most music increasing the more one comes to know the piece.

4. One cannot escape the apparent subjectivity of music as well. I’m curious whether a Papua New Guinean tribesman would find Bach's Mass in B Minor as melodic as one who was raised in a European culture. Personally I find Eastern music quite unmelodic and as such unappealing, although OTOH, western music has enormous appeal in the East, almost at the risk of replacing Eastern music.

What escapes me is our almost instinctive attraction to rhythm.

GPLindsey

A few new thoughts on this issue, now that I've read over the insights others had on this:

1. My understanding is that the part of our brain that processes music is also closely linked to the part that deals with comprehension of mathematics and related systems. When one hears of a child prodigy, it is almost always in the area of music, math, chess, or something akin. One never hears of a 7 year old novelist, because the later requires insights into human emotion, irony, symbolism, analogy, etc., which can only come from living and experience.

2. I may have erred in assuming that nature kept going, because we still have tribal groups in parts of South America, Africa, and New Guinea where it didn't--they are largely at a stone age technology. Despite what theists may think, I think the gap between hunter-gatherers and the great apes is not all that great. An extraterrestrial visitor might note that the humans hunt with sticks, can build primitive domiciles for themselves, and have some form of communication, but otherwise they are not that far ahead of other animals. The real question, then, is why some groups of people advanced rapidly technologically, while others did not.

3. Perhaps the answer is that evolution gave humans the advantages of opposable thumbs, greater capacity for memory, and curiosity, and we just ran with it. As some have pointed out, nature doesn't put governors on development, but there is precedent, I believe,for animals that have developed some trait that was such a great advantage over their competitors or their prey that they dominated their environment and then died out. The possibility of humans blowing themselves up or polluting the world to extinction would be examples of how our intelligence trait could be "corrected" by nature.

4. Another issue here that comes to mind is that technological improvements didn't come all at once, and our advanced societies today are not the result of a biological advances but from accumulated knowledge. Between 1500BC and 500AD, the technological advances were not that great. However, we went from learning how to fly in 1903 to sending probes out of the Solar System in less than a hundred years. More accumulated knowledge and more curious people to build upon it explains much of the difference.

Philosoft

Now this is good stuff, GPL. My college lab studied expert performance in these areas and this makes a whole bunch of sense to me now.

BLoggins02

[off topic]
Be careful, this is ethnocentrism in the extreme. Level of technology does not correlate with levels of neural sophistication. The genetic difference between you and a member of the Yanomamo tribe in South America is almost unmeasureable. Anthropologists who study so-called "primitive" cultures will tell you that many if not most of the inhabitants are every bit as smart and cunning as they are, albeit in ways more advantageous to their immediate society.

Consider also, that while use of advanced technology in primitive cultures may be rare to non-existant, the kinship rules and social structures of these groups can be extremely complex. Any extra-terrestrial explorer would, upon encountering these cultures, clearly be able to differentiate between the intellectual capacity of homo sapiens sapiens and other primates.

Remember, use and development of technology is cultural, not neural. It is simply not the case that primitive cultures somehow use less of their brains.

Don't fall into the trap of ethnocentrism; just because a woman in a hunter-gatherer society doesn't check her email everymorning doesn't mean she is any less of a human being, or any less intelligent.

[/off topic]

Vorkosigan

Despite what theists may think, I think the gap between hunter-gatherers and the great apes is not all that great.

There are no grounds for using technology as a measure of anything. That is purely a European ideology developed after the Europeans overtook other peoples in the deployment of technology.

That said, there are a couple of human groups that have technological toolkits less sophisticated than that of a chimpanzee. This is meaningless. Human sophistication with technology lies not in the complexity of the artifact, but in the complexity of deployment. Chimps do not task specialize with technology, for example. All chimp tech is used singly or in dyads. The real human innovation was using technology in organized groups. Kitchen's Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution explores this in several excellent articles by contributing experts.

Michael