Scientists' theories about why people compose music range from natural selection to community cohesion.

Researchers are creating fresh theories on how music evolved. Some argue that, like writing, music is a cultural invention that emerged independently of natural selection.

Authored by Carl Zimmer

Charles Darwin was fascinated with music. He stated in 1874 that the capacity of humanity to create and appreciate music "must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed."

Darwin believed that although music was produced by all human communities, it did not confer any advantage for our existence. He conjectured that music developed as a means of attracting possible partners. "During their courtship and rivalry, our half-human ancestors," as he termed them, "aroused each other's ardent passions."

There were skeptics among other Victorian scientists. Darwin's theory was dismissed by William James, who said that music is merely a "mere incidental peculiarity of the nervous system" and a result of the way our thoughts function.

That discussion is still going on today. Researchers are creating fresh theories on how music evolved. Some argue that, like writing, music is a cultural invention that emerged independently of natural selection.

The ideas underlying songs 

Scientists have used big data to study these concepts in recent years. They have examined the acoustic characteristics of hundreds of songs that have been recorded across numerous cultures. A more individualized study of music was released on Wednesday by a group of seventy-five researchers. Every researcher sung songs from their respective cultures as part of the study.

Professional musicians, linguists, evolutionary biologists, psychologists, and musicologists made up the team that recorded songs in 55 different languages, including Arabic, Balinese, Basque, Cherokee, Maori, Ukrainian, and Yoruba. The researchers discovered that songs from different cultures had some characteristics in common that are not present in speech, indicating that Darwin may have been correct and that music may have originated from our distant ancestors despite its diversity today.

"It suggests that there might be a genuine universal aspect to all people that goes beyond cultural explanations," stated Daniela Sammler, a neuroscientist at Frankfurt, Germany's Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and an uninvolved party in the research.

Databases containing songs gathered by ethnomusicologists can exclude crucial information. Interpreting the structure and lyrics of songs from different cultures can also be challenging for scholars. Similarly, computers struggle to identify many aspects of music.

Yuto Ozaki, who helped to spearhead the project and received his doctorate at Keio University in Japan, stated, "We thought we should involve the insiders."

Patrick Savage, Ozaki's coworker, took up the task of finding the singers. Savage, a musicologist at the University of Auckland, explained, "It was a combination of the network I'd already built up through the first decade of my career along with going to conferences and making small talk and meeting people."

Each member of the team selected a traditional song to record from their respective ethnicities.

They sang along with the songs, but they also delivered the lyrics without tune so that the team could compare the speech and music afterwards. Additionally, the researchers performed their songs on a variety of instruments, such as melodicas and sitars, to provide another point of comparison.

What the group discovered

Six characteristics, including pitch and tempo, were measured in each recording by the researchers. All of the songs, in spite of their differences, had some characteristics that distinguished them from speech. For example, the pace was slower and the pitch was higher and more steady.

Sammler issued a warning, noting that the majority of the vocalists in the new study were academics and that the songs they selected may have added bias into the study. She described it as basically academics singing potentially unrepresentative material.

She said, however, that an other study that hasn't been released in a scholarly publication reached a similar conclusion. Many of the same qualities were identified in that study by researchers who examined songs in eighteen other languages.

Songs may differ from speech because they serve a unique purpose in human communication, according to Tufts University psychologist Aniruddh Patel, who was not involved in the study. Furthermore, it seems that those characteristics are sensitive to our minds. According to Patel, in 2022, scientists found that human synapses only reacted to singing, not to spoken words or instrumental music.

According to Patel, "song has a unique quality that is present throughout the world as an acoustic signal that maybe our brains have adapted to over evolutionary time."

It's still unclear what kind of evolutionary advantage that signal would provide.

Ozaki remarked, "Perhaps music was required to enhance group cohesion." It's possible that joining together through chorus singing and sharing melodies and rhythms helped people come together as a group or in anticipation of combat.

However, Sammler did not believe that the results of the new study disproved the potential benefits of music, such as strengthening parent-child bonds. She stated, "It could support a lot of theories."

The New York Times published this piece first.