I read up a bit more on theories of music’s function – quotes below.
For any signal a key question is why observers should believe it. For example, many animal sounds come with clear simple reasons to believe them. A loud roar can show the physical strength of its source, and its willingness to expend energy. A soft coo, in contrast, can show that the source is relaxed and comfortable.
With language we humans can say far more things than we can directly show via the way we say it. Even so, speakers and listeners usually have a common interest in agreeing at least on what was meant by what was said. So a listener can often at least credibly believe that the speaker meant to claim a certain thing, even if that listener doesn’t have further reasons to believe that what was said is true.
Music seems to tell emotions, and sometimes it is enough to tell what emotion you claim to have, even if listeners have no further reason to believe that claim. But we seem to have far more types of music than we have kinds of emotions to tell. And the main music puzzle seems to be on the listener end – why are we built so that hearing emotional music evokes similar emotions in ourselves, at least when we are in a receptive frame of mind. Why does music evoke emotions more reliably than does hearing a simple verbal description of the same emotions?
A similar thing happens with stories, at least when we are in a receptive frame of mind. Story-tellers can make us like some people, things, and events, and dislike others, using simple tricks that we all know are evidentially unfair. Why are we as listeners so often eager to enter story and music receptive frames of mind, allowing others to more directly control our emotions, attitudes, and opinions about people, acts, and events?
Yes going through a process like this together that can bond people, as they end up knowing that they have acquired similar emotions and opinions. But why does such a capacity even exist? Why are our minds so vulnerable to raw back door control over what we think and feel?
Yesterday I suggested that this capacity exists exactly because it lets people see that they acquire similar emotions, attitudes, and opinions, a similarity that goes beyond any similar evidence they may each hold supporting such things. As long as we are confident that our associates’ emotions and attitudes are so manipulable, we can be reassured that their attitudes are similar to ours.
But if so, why haven’t some of us evolved a capacity to fake such vulnerability, appearing to enjoy music and stories, but not allowing them to change their attitudes and opinions toward people, acts, and events? A similar issue arises with wanting our associates to internalize key social norms, such as against murder. If our associates could act horrified by murder, but not actually be reluctant to murder, we’d have to be a lot more wary of them.
While some of us do seem especially good at faking feelings, most of us are lousy liars. That combined with our strong censure of apparent fakers produces an equilibrium where most of us stay pretty close to acting vulnerable to key norms, stories, and music.
Those promised quotes:
Steven Pinker … argues that music is merely “auditory cheesecake” – it was evolutionarily adaptive to have a preference for fat and sugar but cheesecake did not play a role in that selection process. Adaptation, on the other hand, is highlighted in hypotheses such as the one … which posits that human music evolved from animal territorial signals, eventually becoming a method of signaling a group’s social cohesion to other groups for the purposes of making beneficial multi-group alliances.
Another proposed adaptive function is creating intra-group bonding. In this aspect it has been seen as complementary to language by creating strong positive emotions while not having a specific message people may disagree on. … A different explanation is that signaling fitness and creativity by the producer or performer in order to attract mates. …
Steven Brown … argues that “music and language are seen as reciprocal specializations of a dual-natured referential emotive communicative precursor, whereby music emphasizes sound as emotive meaning and language emphasizes sound as referential meaning.”
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Joseph Jordania … suggested that rhythmic laud singing and drumming, together with the threatening rhythmic body movements and body painting, was the core element of the ancient “Audio-Visual Intimidating Display” … a key factor in putting the hominid group into a specific altered state of consciousness which he calls “battle trance” … for many social animals, silence can be a sign of danger, and that’s why gentle humming and musical sounds relax humans. (more)
Critics of this [signaling fitness theory] note that in most species where singing is used for the purposes of sexual selection (through the female choice), only males sing (as it is male, who is mostly trying to impress females with different audio and visual displays), and besides, males as a rule sing alone. Among humans both males and females are ardent singers, and making music is mostly a communal activity. (more)
More On Music Function
The sound of a stream is not the central purpose of thewater flowing, but, so what? In so far as any part of our biology is made to resonate in pleasant time to some sound, it is our biology which is the true musical instrument.
One of the basic functions of the organism is self-affirmation. Hence, the potential to have joy at the interactively critical vibrations of one’s domestic medium.
So, crafted sounds for sake of joy is crafted music, notmusic proper. Unless, of course, ‘muse’ is the sense of crafting something, only in which case is ‘music’ synonymous with crafted-sounds-for-joy-of-sounds, and not the sound byproducts of other craftings. Ah, but, all sound byproducts are coopt-able by the musical perceptual faculties, just as any sensory mediumwhatever is coopt-able by the referential (linguistic) faculties.
This does not entail that all mediums should be equally useful to those ends, as if we demand some inane kind of random association between all the different sensory mediums. In fact:
The biological organism requires not only an external sourceof gravity, but a pressure of a domestic medium as a function of gravity. And, so long as there is a normative spatial separation between the organism and all other important solid objects, it seems undeniable that vibration of the organism’s domestic medium is a primary stimulus to the organism, both in termsof itself and in terms of the primary dynamic objects in its environment. Can you say ‘music’ and ‘society’?
Gravity acts as counter-balance to the self-repetition/identification, and self-expansion activities which constitute every known biological organism. This implies, first, that the biological organism is not a self-contained set of all forces necessary to its own survival and development. Second, it implies that the biological organism is, in some way, a product of its gravity environment. In fact, given its own mass, a biological organism is constituted partly by gravity.
But, in so far as the biological organism depends on gravity, it also depends on basic external materials for its maintenance anddevelopment both post-conception and post-gestation. The most continuously necessary material to that end in post-gestation is a common domestic fluid (in land-based organisms, this fluid is the gaseous material that envelopes the Earth). In other words, a natural byproduct of gravity is atmospheric pressure, and, it is upon this pressure which a biological organism depends not only for maintenance of its own structure as an ongoing action against external gravity, but as the primary constant force allowing equitable intake of its own most constantly necessary substance. (It seems to me that this gravity/atmosphericpressure/organism system comprises a triad.)
I suspect that all known biological organisms require aminimum of compression of a domestic medium to survive (atmospheric pressure). Hypothetically, this pressure could be said to act as a necessary counterbalancing force to that of the self-repetition/identification, and self-expansion, activities of the autonomous biological system. In other words, it seems that atmospheric pressure, in conjunction with a basic minimumexternal gravity, is necessary to the long-term survival of a species.
Pressure of domestic medium is, for the most part, a staticforce. But, in order for an organism to identify other organisms without direct contact, and, thus, to develop internal systems to identify itself apart from other organisms, an organism’s domestic medium must include vibrations produced by other organisms.
Based on this theory that vibration of domestic medium iscritical to the normal development of an organism, I propose the hypothesis that music and language are basic cognitive functions prior to their respective conventional specializations. Think sense and reference. According to this hypothesis, only later are the sense and reference functions in humans channeled into conventions: the language function normally is channeled intospeech, and the music function normally is channeled into human artful sounds.
But, there is a problem. According to this hypothesis, theconventions intuitively are known to contain their respective basic functions, so, oftentimes, the conventions are mistakenly equated with their functions. Hence, the popular human notion that the essential roots of music and language are not naturally possessed by non-human animals. But, if vibration of adomestic medium is necessary to the survival of any given animal species, including to humans, and if that vibration is a key stimulus to biology, and, thus, to psychology, then non-human animals do possesses a level, however primitive, of both the referential and sense/aesthetic modes of cognition. How well or how often the non-human animals practice a distinction between these two modes is beside the point.
I'm just going to pick some fleas, so to speak. The auditory cheesecake argument is completely invalid and demeaning. I think the intra-group bonding idea is quite compelling. The main points this thread seems to be missing is what a signal is. Signals have intrinsic meaning. Music and language both have applied meaning. Also music is uniquely human. The paragraph about species singing for a mate is a bit off the mark. We call what birds and whales do singing but it is not the same thing as the human behavior of singing at all.