I've often wondered why we like music.
It seems sort of arbitrary, and it may actually be soon (more on that
later). But regardless, we do
like music. It's found in every culture around the world. It is truly
ubiquitous as a human trait (barring a small portion of the
population whose brains are wired differently). So why do we like
music?
Well
it could just be a fluke. Maybe we just like music because it's
something our brains just evolved to like. However I'd like to posit
a different hypothesis. Of course this is just my opinion, and it
could be wrong, but I think it hangs together pretty well.
Start
hundreds of thousands of years ago. A branch of proto-humans starts
experimenting with sound. This isn't anything new or unique. Dolphins
and various birds make a whole host of complex sounds to communicate.
Many animals do complex mating dances and calls. Of course many
animals don't do much of this. Slugs don't do a whole lot of
anything. Cats have a few different meows and hisses at their
disposal, but there's only so much you can communicate with that.
So
this branch of proto-humans finds that having a wider range of noises
they can both make and distinguish gives them a unique ability to
coordinate with other member of their species that other animals
can't. As so it was that speech was selected for. We probably made
different pitches of grunts, whistles, hums, and so forth. Over time
this became so useful that we started developing physical structures
to aid in the creation of these unique sounds.
At a
certain point, this evolution of noises hit a tipping point where the
ambiguity of what we were conveying was replaced with codified
languages. Why have to distinguish between a high pitched noise and a
low pitched noise when we can agree on logical operators which can
literally convey anything (math, science, religion, emotion, etc.).
So
what does it have to do with music? I like to think that music was a
skill which allowed our proto-human ancestors to get better at both
the making and distinguishing of sounds. I can almost imagine groups
of proto-humans dancing around in circles stamping their feet in
rhythum and making coordinated sounds not all that dissimilar from
music. The species which practice music and had an appreciation for
it were able to better recognize subtle differences and relationships
between sounds that non-musical minds could not. There may well be
different paths to speech that don't involve music, but I think music
was a very obvious and simple tool to enable the evolution of speech.
And
this never went away. But will it? We have a robust set of
communication techniques available to us. Different spoken languages,
art (which may have similar roots as it relates to other centers of
the brain), math and logic, sign language, facial expression and so
on. As far as developing a patter of making noises to communicate
with other members of our species, we're pretty much “there”...
right Well there's two answers I think are plausible (actually more
than that, but these are the broad categories). An optimistic view
and a pessimistic one.
First
the pessimistic. We really have gotten about as much out of the
tactic of making music as we can get. Music is nice, but it's
vestigial and has served it's purpose. Over time, we may lose the
ability to care about music. As we use complex languages born out of
a musical background, the need for that skill will just fade away.
Perhaps not completely, but it will no longer be a powerful driving
evolutionary force as it was in the past leaving it to be overwritten
with more applicable software.
Now
the optimistic. We have very little insight into what traits actually
drive our future evolution. It's reasonably easy to look at our
history and see why we evolved one trait over another. But predicting
where we will evolve next? There are just too many factors at play to
know which one will dominate others, especially with something as
complicated as the human physical and emotional reaction to beauty.
Doesn't that sound optimistic? Our profound ignorance in the forces
at play guiding our evolution? Well the optimistic part is that we've
had complex language for a long time, and we still have music as
well. It should be obvious to anyone who loves music that the parts
of the psyche that are touched when listening to or creating music
are deep and meaningful. Regardless of what it may have started out
as, we have incorporated it into how we as humans think. It's quite
possible it serves a different purpose now. Maybe more along the
lines of why we dream. Or how we connect emotionally with others.
Maybe it's still fine-tuning how we connect with people. It's a form
of communication; of poetry. When we hear a touching lyric in a song,
we contemplate it's meaning. We act on those emotions. Music may be
more central to how we think than we even realize.
