Tomer asks: Why do people like to hear music or at least a collection of cyclical sounds with certain harmonies? How does this give us an evolutionary advantage?
The evolution of music, which Darwin considered a "mysterious phenomenon", is one of the most intriguing of the biological puzzles that have yet to be answered.
A great deal of research has been carried out on a variety of creatures to determine what musical abilities they have: a particularly bizarre study found that carp had the ability to differentiate between baroque and blues music. And yet, apart from humans, only 2 groups of animals show musical ability, that is, they learn from listening and training to create sequences of sounds from a scale of notes: the songbirds and the whales. This is the result of "convergent evolution", meaning similar mechanisms that have evolved in different creatures independently, similar to the wings of bats and birds or the fins of fish and dolphins. Our relatives the chimpanzees and gorillas have no musical ability. The monkeys will recognize sounds such as the typical voice of the group members or the human handlers but a chimpanzee cannot be taught to recognize a song. Recognizing a melody means recognizing not individual sounds (different frequencies of sound waves) but relationships between them: we will easily recognize the same song performed by singers with different voices from each other and this ability seems natural to us, but the fact that a child immediately understands that father is from them the same song sung by the kindergarten teacher It is the result of the operation of a complex and very new mechanism from an evolutionary point of view. Studies have shown that monkeys will prefer lullabies to techno but will prefer silence to any music. Despite the similarity between the song of birds and whales and human music, singing in animals has well-defined roles: birds will sing to find a mate and keep intruders away from their territories, whales sing during the courtship season and only for this purpose. Accordingly, males sing much more than females and singing is limited to certain seasons. Only in humans the musical ability is equal and every day is suitable for music.
There is no way to know when our ancestors started making music. The oldest human musical instrument is a flute made of swan bone that is about 40,000 years old, but since bone is an inconvenient material for making flutes and plant materials are usually used that leave no traces for archaeologists, it is almost certain that the history of wind instruments is much older. Percussion instruments are probably older than the flute and singing is probably the oldest music.
A byproduct of language development
Some believe that our ability to enjoy and produce music is a by-product of the development of human language. In order to speak, our ancestors had to go through major anatomical and neurological changes. In monkeys, the voice box is close to the upper end of the trachea and allows the animal to breathe and swallow at the same time because it creates a buffer between the trachea and esophagus, a chimpanzee puppy is similar to a human baby but will never choke from eating nuts. The unique location of our vocal cords in the depths of the throat sometimes costs us inhaling food into the reed, but we gain a large resonance space that expands the range of sounds we can produce. From the shape of the base of the skull in the fossils, it seems that only about 300,000 years ago the voice box stabilized in its current position and it is difficult to assume that our ancestors could sing in an earlier period than that. Other developments included the reduction of the tongue and improved control of its movements and improved control of the respiratory muscles that allows for a continuous and constant flow of air needed to maintain a loud voice over time.
Corresponding changes are evident in the auditory system that has evolved to increase the sensitivity to the frequencies produced by the human vocal system. It is possible that the ability to listen to music relies on ancient information analysis skills designed for survival purposes. Auditory scene analysis is the ability to track significant sound cues in a noisy environment. To focus on the footsteps of a carnivorous (or appetizing) animal against the background of chirping birds and the rustling of leaves in the wind requires more than receiving sound waves in the ear. There is no auditory equivalent for Mukola (macula) that very sensitive area of the retina that focusing light on allows immediate diagnosis in details of shape, size, color and distance of the object we are interested in. Acoustic information cannot be focused and is spread over a wide range of frequencies and intensities coming from all over space. Understanding the environment through hearing requires the identification of patterns in the characteristics of the sound - central frequency and the overtones (overtones) and their development over time. It is required to separate sounds that may partially overlap and connect sounds from the same source over time even when the sound characteristics change. This ability to process information that evolved for survival allows us today to enjoy the sounds of several instruments at the same time in an orchestra when we notice the relationships between different sounds at the same time (harmony) and follow the changes in time (melody). But these tools that we and other animals share does not explain our desire to create and listen to music.
All these changes at the base of musical evolution are also the ones that allow us to speak and the spoken language is a great survival advantage. Some argue, therefore, that spoken language and music share a common biological basis: an ancient form of musical language communication. Both music and speech are combinations of basic units (characters or syllables), in both of these modes of communication the rhythm and intervals between the units have meaning and the same anatomical development enables both. When our grammatical language was formed we were left with a musical ability that has no survival significance.
Music according to this opinion is a parasitic quality, a by-product of the development of the ability to produce and analyze sounds. This belief is reinforced by the fact that Broca's area in the left frontal lobe of our brain is responsible for understanding linguistic syntax and is also activated when a wrong chord is played in a piece of music. The problem with this theory is that we pay a high price for musical pleasure: music reveals our location to enemies and predators, is a wasteful occupation of time, energy and attention. One would expect evolutionary pressure to eradicate such a feature and yet music survives in all human cultures. In addition, brain studies show that music does not inhibit speech in excess: listening to music activates different areas of the brain: there are brain injuries that lead to a speech disorder (aphasia) and others that lead to a lack of musical ability (amusia).
Another theory hinges our musical ability on sexual selection: the one who was good at singing serenades won the heart of the princess. What to do, but it is difficult to base this romantic theory on facts. Traits related to choosing a mate tend to differ between species: there is a big difference between male and female birds singing and female whales do not sing at all. In humans, the musical ability is equal in both sexes. Love songs are indeed common, but they are actually the least universal: the chance that a love song from one culture will be recognized as such by a stranger is less than his chance to recognize other songs.
The music as a game?
Another theory that gained popularity is that of music as a game. In English the same verb Play is used for both playing and playing, play is used in many species of animals as training for the tasks of the adult. Music, according to this theory, is a kind of training for communication and thinking. Since people tend to retain childish traits throughout their lives, the music also stays with us. This theory gained popularity thanks to the "Mozart effect", the idea that exposing babies to classical music improves intelligence in adulthood. The problem with the "Mozart effect" is that somehow Mozart achieved all of his achievements without being played Mozart tapes as a child. The differences between language and music are too fundamental for music to be seen as training for language acquisition and there is no research basis for the idea of improving intellectual ability as a result of exposure to music.
More established theories see music as an independent factor rather than an excess of spoken language or a degenerate relic of archaic communication. Music is very different from language: it has no semantics (meaning) or syntax, unlike speech which will bore us if it is repeated, we enjoy hearing favorite songs over and over again. The music carries emotional meaning and not information, so it is appropriate to look for its role in the emotional field. Two explanations focusing on the emotional role of music seem plausible. One hypothesis points to the social role of music: people sing or play together and in the process create identification and cohesion. With our ancestors, the tribe consisted of family members: the group formation had a high survival significance. Music is the human substitute for the mutual grooming (combing and lice removal) of our ape relatives. Critics of this explanation point to the fact that as a substitute for mutual extermination of lice, humans have at their disposal a more effective and economical instrument than poetry - speech. It is possible that poetry did not develop as a tool for social Likud but as a means of presenting this cohesion to the outside. Many territorial species announce their territory and deter intruders from it by making coordinated threatening sounds. This is how wolves and chimpanzees behave, for example. "Singing in public" is a reliable signal for the size of the group, the strength and coordination between the individuals. War songs are an ancient and important type of human music. Coordinated singing, which requires the creation of a musical culture for the group, could be used not only to deter rival groups but also as a reliable signal that alliances or coalitions should be formed with them.
Another theory focuses on the most common musical genre in all cultures: the lullaby. Babies clearly prefer singing to talking and a lullaby is the best way to soothe them. Every parent knows the exhaustion and loss of temper caused by a child's incessant crying. Being able to soothe a baby and get a few hours of sleep meant a lot to our ancestors' chances of survival. The ability to sing and respond to a lullaby is perhaps the source of music. Lullabies are also the most universal: extensive research has shown that people correctly identify lullabies sung in different languages and musical traditions, and babies calm down even when they are played a lullaby in a foreign language.
It is possible that in the end science confirms what Natan Alterman understood
"Most music has sounds
But the lullaby we knew
And we hid in the dishes
Only he stayed with us in the end"
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More of the topic in Hayadan:
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The tremendous effort to prove that something as complex and amazing and charming as music was created from such a primitive and free theory as evolution proves that there is an intelligent creator with a sense of humor
Whoever does not believe that man is a little more intelligent monkey, look in the mirror!
The answer is very simple. We did not evolve from the animals, the first man was created by the hand of the Creator and gave him superiority over the animals.
There are those who will say that the image that shows the drummer as an evolution from the monkey actually presents an opposite reality in which the evolution really started with the drummer and developed into a monkey...
The problem with the "Mozart effect" is that somehow Mozart achieved all of his achievements without being played Mozart tapes as a child.
This is not true, Mozart's parents were also professional musicians and so was his older sister.
Hear music from his first day as a seed.
I don't understand the article, it has long been known that a musical song allows us to remember the details in it. So basically the music and singing together is a means of transferring information and memory.
An interesting and impressive article full of insights that stretch into the abyss of femininity.
Is there an analogy between a cat's purr, which relaxes and even heals, and a human hum, which seems to also provide these benefits, and may have been antecedent to musical instruments
Are confused people often smarter?