Almost all normally developing humans learn to speak within a few years of birth and speak many times per day throughout their lives, while there is a much larger variation in musical abilities (e.g., the ability to synchronise taps to a musical beat) among normally developing humans. Most strikingly, deaf people naturally develop sign language, while there is no naturally developing “sign music” equivalent.6 Unlike Pinker’s dismissive conclusion that music is biologically “useless,” Patel’s more positive interpretation was that the “beneficial biological impact of music, while not the reason for its origin or maintenance in human societies, makes music a biologically powerful human invention or transformative technology of the mind (TTM)” (Patel, 2018; cf. Patel, 2010, 2023).

Given that language is generally considered to be unique to humans (Hauser et al., 2002; Bowling & Fitch, 2015; Sharma et al., 2024)

more controlled and comprehensive comparisons of vocal learning and beat entrainment across species are needed to resolve this debate (see four commentaries and response accompanying Patel 2024a/2024b and Section 5.3.4 below).

more controlled and comprehensive comparisons of vocal learning and beat entrainment across species are needed to resolve this debate (see four commentaries and response accompanying Patel 2024a/2024b and Section 5.3.4 below).

the social value of music can manifest itself in bonding people together (with their children, mates, allies, etc.), as well as signaling the strength of these bonds and other qualities to competing individuals or groups

I propose an extended social bonding hypothesis unifying our previous social bonding hypothesis, Darwin’s “musical protolanguage” hypothesis, and Patel’s “vocal learning and rhythmic synchronisation” hypothesis, such that the evolution of human song via vocal learning preceded and enabled the evolution of spoken language

the resurgence of interest in the evolution of music/musicality (Wallin et al., 2000; Honing, 2018) and the realisation that understanding musical evolution requires an understanding of what is universal about music

Despite such pleas, later ethnomusicologists increasingly emphasised non-acoustic aspects of music, leading some to criticise “a growing reluctance to discuss musical sound at all” captured by the sarcastic label “eth-NO-MUSIC-ology” (Miller & Shahriari, 2021: xi).

Darwin’s concept of evolution as “descent with modification” emphasised branching diversification into separate lineages, which can then become adapted to diverse ecological niches without any being necessarily “more” or “less” evolved than the other (Figure 5.2B).3

To truly understand the evolutionary origins of musicality or language, we cannot study them independently but must compare both human song and human speech across a wide variety of species and cultures.

phylogenetic comparative analysis

beat synchronisation) that have traditionally been thought of as “absent” in non-human animals

Honing (2018) defines musicality as “a natural, spontaneously developing set of traits based on and constrained by our cognitive and biological system.

Biological studies of musicality continue a long tradition emphasising relationships between human music, human language, and animal vocalisation

cross-species framework

Subjective listening experiments show an interesting mix of agreement and disagreement among listeners, which can help or hinder analyses depending on their goal. Western staff notation is useful for precise comparison of related melodies, but often not well-suited for comparing across cultures. Cantometrics is well-suited for broad cross-cultural comparison, but less well-suited for comparing fine-grained differences within cultures or very broad comparisons between human and animal vocalisations. Automatic analyses allow for more detailed and objective comparisons of music and speech, but struggle to capture some of the complexities of polyphonic music and extract features such as scale tunings from the imprecision found in real singing. And we haven’t even touched on more sophisticated automated methods (e.g., Music Information Retrieval Toolbox [Lartillot et al., 2008]; Essentia [Bogdanov et al., 2013]; Librosa [McFee et al., 2015])16 or other comparative methods such as qualitative analysis or approaches based on Indigenous knowledge (for a very brief glimpse of those, see the Epilogue).

subjective listening experiments

“in the conceptualization, design, conduct or publication of the research,”

but our data is almost entirely filtered through the ears, brains, and epistemologies of the predominantly Western researchers and listeners who have converted the audio recordings into standardised formats like Cantometric codings or transcriptions in staff notation.

in 1835, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called music ‘the universal language of mankind.’ he turned out to have been right.”