Andrew Major

Music Bibliography 440

Fall 2017
Annotated Bibliography

Topic Description: From an evolutionary point of view, language and music are uncharacteristic
occurrences, because they appear in only one species: Homo sapiens. Language and music are an
important part of what makes us human. While we are experiencing an enormous expansion in our
knowledge about the origin of life, the universe and almost everything else that we have seen fit to
ponder, we still know very little about how our capacity for language and music emerged and evolved
into the complex linguistic and musical systems we use today. Like all other scientific pursuits, the
evolution of language and music via natural selection in a biological sense requires a rejection of the
null hypothesis, in this case the null that there has not been direct selection for the evolution of language
or music.

Research Questions:

 It is undeniable that there is an intrinsic link between language and music, but how might
biological evolution account for this bond?
 Did music come before language, did language come before music – or was there some common
progenitor that somehow separated into two distinct yet still overlapping strands of
communication?
 To what extent have our bodies and brains been shaped by natural selection for music?
 Was music an important ingredient in the phenotypic recipe that contributed to the survival of
our newly evolved species?
 What collection of circuitries and abilities was needed to generate and underpin what we define
as human musical behavior?
 Is there a middle ground between a trait that has been selected for and a trait that is biologically
useless?
 Why does music continue to remain important to all human cultures, thousands of generations
after the founders of our species evolved?

Annotated Bibliography:

Bannan, Nicholas, ed. Music, language, and human evolution. Oxford University Press, 2012.

This reference book is a collection devoted to the role evolution has played in the development
of the two faculties of language and music presented in a straightforward and easily readable format.
Each chapter has its own references, and in one case, a discography of examples. Following an
introduction, articles are grouped into sections according to the academic disciplines on which the
authors focus their research. While not every chapter will be of use to those who have an interest in
language and evolution, there is still much of value to anyone studying the relationship between music
and language or language and evolution. In short, this is a useful volume, especially as a starting point
for those investigating the various ways in which evolutionary theory intersects with the disciplines of
linguistics and musicology. Editor Nicholas Bannan is a composer and choral conductor who has taught
music both at school and university level while embarking on research into aspects of singing and
creativity. He has published on the potential of singing in the care of patients with Alzheimer's, the
evolution of the singing voice, and the role of creativity in musical learning. He taught at the University
of Reading before taking up his current post at the University of Western Australia.

Darwin, Charles. The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. Vol. 1. London: Murray, 1888.

Musical activities lack any obvious survival value. Why then is music so pervasive in human
life? Are we musical today because music helped our ancestors survive? Has the human mind been
shaped by natural selection for music? In his book The descent of man, Charles Darwin, the famed
naturalist, geologist, biologist, and the father of the theory of evolution itself, wrestled with these
questions, noting that “as neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties
of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life, they must be ranked among the
most mysterious with which he is endowed.” Darwin draws an analogy with birdsong and theorizes that
music arose in our ancestors via mechanisms of sexual selection. He hypothesizes that wordless
courtship songs predated human linguistic abilities, and that such singing provided the foundation upon
which language itself evolved. Certainly not a current or rigorously evidence-backed source, The
descent of man instead serves as an excellent starting point for more meticulous study and debate by
presenting the earliest adaptationist argument for the biological evolution of music. Intended for his
colleagues, this source is a difficult read full of jargon in addition to its nineteenth century use of
language.

Dissanayake, E. (2004). “Motherese is but one part of a ritualized, multimodal, temporally organized,
affiliative interaction.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27(4), 512-513.
doi:10.1017/S0140525X0432011X

A second adaptationist proposal concerns parental care. Ellen Dissanayke, an independent scholar
focusing on "the anthropological exploration of art and culture," points to the cross-cultural importance
of vocal communication in human infant care, whereby adults use melodious and rhythmic vocalizations
(“motherese”) to soothe or arouse infants. Motherese can aid in biological regulation and stability of
infants suggesting that such vocalizations had adaptive value for infant survival, so Dissanayke proposes
that music has its origins in vocalizations aimed at caring for infant offspring. The author of five books
and dozens of journal articles, Dissanayke’s work has earned her an honorary doctorate and teaching
positions at universities across the globe, and currently is an affiliate professor in the University of
Washington School of Music. This article is intended for an academic audience, with all the strengths
and weaknesses implicit to that style of writing including specific terminology and concise writing
where every word must be slowly digested.
Dunbar, Robin Ian MacDonald, and Louise Barrett, eds. Oxford handbook of evolutionary psychology.
New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2007.

In addition to well studied areas of investigation, such as mate choice and reproduction, this
reference book also includes chapters on the philosophical underpinnings of evolutionary psychology,
comparative perspectives from other species, recent neurobiological findings, and, for my purposes, the
issue of cultural evolution in relation to human psychology. The chapters combine a review of the
relevant literature with well reasoned arguments and discussions of the major findings, as well as
original insights and suggestions for future work. Chapter 45 focuses on music and cognitive evolution
and provides very broad strokes covering the history of music in evolutionary thinking, issues in the
definition of music, archaeological, ethological, and cognitive evidence of music evolution. This chapter
has little mention of experimental methods and instead provides a starting point for research by
presenting the various strains, trends, and opinions of scholarship in the field of music evolution for a
non-specialist audience. This chapter is written by Ian Cross, Professor of Music & Science and
Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, where he is Director of the Faculty’s Centre for Music and
Science. While this particular chapter is most directly relevant to my topic, I have chosen to cite the
entire source because it provides a strong foundational understanding of the latest developments in the
field of evolutionary psychology.

Harvey, Alan. Music, Evolution, and the Harmony of Souls. Oxford University Press, 2017.

This book explores the importance of music in human evolution, and its continued relevance to
modern-day society. Throughout, the emphasis is on the origin of music and how (and where) it is
processed in our brains. This book explains how modern humans have evolved with unique neural and
cognitive architecture, and why two complementary but distinct communication systems – language and
music – remain a human universal. It explores in depth why musical communication was (and remains)
advantageous to our species and why the social harmonization it brings, was of vital importance in early
humans and how the sociobiological importance of music as a driver of cooperative and interactive
behavior throughout human existence means to twenty-first century humanity and beyond. Alan Harvey
is a PhD neurophysiologist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Western Australia, with practical
experience in music, having sung in choirs for the past 50 years including a tour of the Perth Symphonic
Chorus’ appearance in Carnegie Hall. This book is easier to read than a typical peer-reviewed,
specialist-oriented source because it presents and explains important background information. That said,
the writing is scholarly and requires a broad vocabulary which embraces scientific jargon.

Kandel, Eric, Thomas Jessel, Steven Siegelbaum, James H. Schwartz, and A. J. Hudspeth,
eds. Principles of Neural Science, 5th Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013.

In this text, prominent researchers in the field expertly survey the entire spectrum of neural
science, giving an up-to-date view of the discipline for anyone who studies brain and mind, presenting
the current state of neural science knowledge ranging from molecules and cells, to anatomic structures
and systems, to the senses and cognitive functions. Throughout my bibliography I have made note of the
immense requisite neuroscience knowledge required to understand several articles and this is the
reference source that provides this knowledge. Because natural selection and evolution are biological
processes, it is necessary to understand the biological underpinnings of music, which is largely based on
an in-depth knowledge of neuroscience. Of particular relevance to the topic of music evolution are
entries dedicated to auditory processing, learning, memory, and emotion. Edited by the “father of
neuroscience” and Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel among other experts in the field, this reference source
provides a complete picture of the field of neuroscience from every angle. Although this book provides
requisite neuroscience knowledge, some understanding of biology, chemistry, and physics is necessary
to fully comprehend it. This text is usually used at and above the graduate level by specialists.

Kenneally, Christine. The first word: The search for the origins of language. New York: Viking, 2007.

Kenneally begins this book by saying “the story of language evolution studies is unavoidably the
story of the intellectual reign of Noam Chomsky.” Since Chomsky asserted that language is a uniquely
human phenomenon, he doubted evolution played a role in its origin. So great was his influence that
scientists have only recently overcome their inhibitions and turned up fascinating evidence to the
contrary. This book is a lucid survey of the expanding field of language evolution, dedicated to solving
what Kenneally calls “the hardest problem in science today.” Kenneally, a linguist and popular science
journalist trained at Cambridge, covers an enormous expanse of ground as she brings the reader up to
date on developments in a wide variety of disciplines touching on language evolution. At times, she
lapses into a somewhat mechanical recitation of experiments, papers and positions, but she channels this
flood of frequently technical arguments into a comprehensible and stimulating narrative accessible to
non-specialists. As noted throughout this annotated bibliography, the link between music and language
is inextricable, and therefore any research into the evolution of music, as in my case, must involve some
degree of an understanding of the field of linguistic evolution, which this source provides.

Merker, Bjorn. “Speech, Vocal Production Learning, and the Comparative Method.” Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 37, no. 6 (2014): 566–67. doi:10.1017/S0140525X13004147.

The Swedish neurobiologist Björn Merker argues that vocal learning, the ability to match vocal
production to auditory models, first involved “songs” that, over many, many generations, became more
and more analytically and semantically complex, with words and gestures evolving later: “language
emerged as an inadvertent consequence of the inter-generational transmission of a rich repertoire of
song.” According to Merker, this emergence would have been a slow process of “hundreds and
thousands of generations” eventually leading to core syntactic and prosodic platforms that led to the
emergence of modern language and articulate speech. Merker earned his PhD at MIT and has taught at
UCLA and New York University researching oculomotor physiology in cats, the primary visual cortex
in macaques, song development and mirror self-recognition in gibbons, and the evolutionary and
developmental background to human music and language. In retirement he continues theoretical work
related to the origins of music and language as well as brain mechanisms of consciousness. Appearing in
a book rather than a formal journal, this article blends elements of popular science style with the
author’s familiarity with rigorous scholarship and is intended for an audience which includes non-
specialists.

Mithen, Steven. The Singing Neanderthals: the origins of music, language, mind and body. London:
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005.

With equal parts scientific rigor and charm, Steven Mithen marshals current evidence about
social organization, tool and weapon technologies, hunting and scavenging strategies, habits and brain
capacity of all our hominid ancestors, and comes up with a scenario for a shared musical and linguistic
heritage. Along the way he describes vocalized sound, communal mimicry, sexual display, and rhythmic
movement of various species. In this book for casual readers, Mithen draws together strands from
archaeology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and musicology to explain why we are so
compelled to make and hear music, a fundamental aspect of the human condition encoded into the
human genome through the idea of sexual selection (like Darwin but in an up-to-date rigorous way). The
result is a fascinating book—and a succinct riposte to those, like Steven Pinker, who have dismissed
music as a functionless evolutionary byproduct accessible to a wide readership including non-specialists.
Steven Mithen is Dean of the Faculty of Science at Reading University where he has taught
Archaeology. This source is of particular interest because of Mithen’s expertise in strains of evidence
beyond the comfort zone of many other authors in this bibliography.

Nelken, Israel. "Music and the auditory brain: where is the connection?" Frontiers in human
neuroscience, 5 (2011): 106. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2011.00106

Tones, tonal relationships, melodic contour, harmony, pitch, duration, timbre, intensity, and
rhythm are descriptors that reduce music to its essential physical components when studying the
psychophysics of music. Yet, when we listen to a piece of music, most of us do not consciously
deconstruct the sounds into all their core elements; the total experience (“gestalt”) is everything. What
we hear depends on a rapid abstraction and analysis of multidimensional stimuli. To understand the
evolution of music, therefore, we must first understand on some level how the brain processes music.
Israel Nelken is Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and a member of the Center for Brain
Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In this journal article, he argues that “While we
struggle with the nature of sound representations in the auditory brain, it is singularly easy to observe the
signature of sound organization on the neural responses, starting as early as the inferior colliculus. Thus,
organization is reflected in the neural responses of the auditory brain more strongly, and at earlier stages,
than sounds (in the sense of ‘objects of perception’).” The fact that English is Nelken’s second language,
combined with his use of first person tense makes this article easier to read, however an understanding
of experimental methods and neuroanatomy is requisite.
Patel, Aniruddh D. “Music, biological evolution, and the brain.” In Emerging disciplines, edited by M.
Bailor. Houston: Rice University Press, 2010: 91-144.

When we see a universal and ancient trait, we cannot simply assume that it has been a direct
target of natural selection. Growing evidence from neuroscience suggests that music is biologically
powerful, meaning that it can have lasting effects on nonmusical abilities during the lifetime of
individual human. This is where Patel’s theory comes in. By biologically powerful, Patel means that
musical behaviors like playing and listening can have lasting effects on nonmusical brain functions, such
as language, attention, and executive function within individual lifetimes. Music is thus theorized to be a
biologically powerful human invention or “transformative technology of the mind” which he calls TTM
theory. Having earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, Patel now teaches as Tufts University and where his
research focuses on music cognition: the mental processes involved in making, perceiving, and
responding to music. Another highly-technical article, Patel uses scientific jargon and presupposes an in-
depth of neuroscience and experimental methods to follow his argument.

Patel, Aniruddh D. Music, language, and the brain. Oxford University Press, 2010.

This book is a comprehensive interdisciplinary syncretization of recent research in the

comparative study of music and language, and how each system is processed by the brain. Patel
maintains that there are valid reasons to believe that spoken and musical sounds are treated differently
by the brain. Going further, he proposes that there are more cognitive and neural similarities than
differences between the two; and, not only do they share a number of basic processing mechanisms, but
the comparative study itself provides a powerful way to explore these neural mechanisms. Patel is the
Esther J. Burnham Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at the Neuroscience Institute in San
Diego. His work focuses on music and the brain, with a primary area of interest being the relationship
between music and language, and on how the comparative study of these uniquely human abilities of
communication can shed light on their underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. Patel's book is a
logically assembled comprehensive presentation of the work that has and is being done in this relatively
new field of inquiry. While some of the examples are highly technical, Patel successfully connects
research in the fields of linguistics, cognitive science, music cognition, and neuroscience into a clear text
for the expert and non-specialist alike.

Pinker, S. How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.

In sharp contrast to adaptationist theories, nonadaptationist theories of music posit that there has
been no natural selection for musical abilities in our species. The most prominent such theory, that of
Steven Pinker, is presented in this book and regards music as a pleasure technology built from pre-
existing brain functions and posits that “As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is
useless.” Pinker’s proposal starts with the theory that many cognitive skills have been direct targets of
natural selection. Music, he argues, is a human invention that is universal because of its link to pleasure:
“Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through
the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once.” Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one
of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. Currently Johnstone Family
Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Pinker has also taught at Stanford and MIT, is author of
ten books, and a recipient of eight honorary doctorates. Written in the style of popular science, this
source uses vernacular language and is accessible to a wide range of audiences seeking to delve into the
field of language and music evolution.

Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T., & Moll, H. “Understanding and sharing intentions:
The origins of cultural cognition.” Behavioral and brain sciences, 28 (2005): 675-691.
doi:10.1017/S0140525X05000129

Michael Tomasello is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and
is James F. Bonk Professor of Education and Training at Duke University, where his research explores
processes of social cognition, social learning, cooperation, and communication from developmental,
comparative, and cultural perspectives. In this scholarly article intended for an academic audience,
Tomasello et al. present a constructionist theory, arguing that there has only been indirect selection for
language, providing humans with the social-cognitive capabilities to construct language, and by
extension music. This perspective is likened to playing chess: there has not been direct selection for the
ability to play chess though it is a complex cognitive ability unique to humans, instead, natural selection
has allowed for the development of the cognitive skills necessary to play chess and in this way selection
has only played an indirect role in shaping our chess-playing capabilities. In this view, as brain
structures became more apt for language processing, music may have emerged as a byproduct. Since
music has implications that reflect culture, music may have been selected for in a decisive way driven by
humanity. This idea is a different perspective on similar ideas presented in Merker’s book.

Wallin, Nils Lennart, Björn Merker, and Steven Brown, eds. The Origins of Music. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2001.

The Origins of Music brings together papers on subjects ranging from birdsong to neurobiology
to fossil flutes to musical universals to see the start of an evolutionary musicology, a subfield of
biomusicology "devoted to the analysis of music evolution, both its biological and cultural forms.” After
an introduction to evolutionary musicology by the editors, the other papers are grouped into four
sections. The first focuses on vocal communication in animals. The second section looks broadly at
music and language in human evolution. The third section presents different theories for the origin of
music, and the last four papers are grouped in a section title "Musical Universals". This section looks at
human predispositions for processing music, the connections between the generative theory of tonal
music with innate competencies, and finally presents the perspective of an ethnomusicologist's and a
composer on these universals. Comprising articles from over 25 experts in disciplines ranging from
composition to neurophysiology, this reference book provides an ideal starting point for research in the
field of music evolution or an overview of the subject accessible to a wide audience including casual
readers.