Did we evolve to like music?

BTW, certain sounds are more pleasing than others probably just down to the effect they have on the ears and associated nervous system. Like looking at a simple solid pattern is more pleasant than an out of tune TV picture of fuzzy dots which is irritating quite quickly.

I think our ears have evolved to sort out different harmonics and frequencies to allow us to differentiate between a variety of sounds and listen to more than one thing at a time but still perceive them seperately.

Distorted sounds are unpleasant. Maybe they are hard for the brain to "figure out" with no pattern so maybe we really like sounds with a very clear pattern - musical melody and harmony certain fit the bill structurally and mathematically.
 
I have a lot of rambling, probably nonsensical stuff to say about this topic, but [un]fortunately I'm at work right now. A lot of what I would ramble about was already said much more eloquently in this fascinating episode of Radiolab.

I'd be especially interested to see what others think about this.
 
Splossy said:
Try listening to traditional chinese music and I think you'll agree that muscial appreciation is, to a large degree learned!
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And by the way of Chinese: In recent years it has been disovered that in cultures where meaning in language depends on tonality, nobody is tone deaf. This appears to be a question of nurture only, not of nature: If you grow up in a culture where meaning does not depend on pitch, you risk becoming tone deaf.
 
Shera said:
@ wilks: Try listening to different types, and give each type more than 5 mins. I think Yahoo has unlimited music you can download for $5 a month, and there is always your local library (they lend music, not just books.)

There's an extremely wide range of music out there, much more than whats available on commercial radio. I've no doubt there will be at least one type you'll enjoy.
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Nice of you to point me in the right direction Shera.....but why are you assuming I haven't tried?
The only good thing is that now, in my fifties, I don't have to pretend to like it just to fit in.
 
wilks said:
Nice of you to point me in the right direction Shera
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Did I? I may not have! :eye-poppi This isn't one of the areas I know best, not by a long shot. I'm very hard of hearing, have recruitment (that means its easy for me to land plastered on the ceiling), but I still enjoy music. FWIW, I particularly like bluegrass at the moment.

....but why are you assuming I haven't tried?
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The only good thing is that now, in my fifties, I don't have to pretend to like it just to fit in.
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You're right, I shouldn't have assumed. But the range of music is so wide. -- well, I would have the same reaction if you said you didn't like food. And I suspect that music varies more than food does.

Because this is a public forum and ya just never know who could be reading -- I'm going to toss out the idea of hyperacusis, an unusual sensitivity or irritation to some or all sounds. I'm not assuming that you have this, but I don't think this is a well known condition, and a public forum is a good place to bring up information for others to consider.

Most conditions exist in a continuum. Again, I won't assume you have it, but I would say that for anyone who dislikes all music, it is a possibility that they may have a slight undiagnosed version of this. /derail
 
Shera said:
Because this is a public forum and ya just never know who could be reading -- I'm going to toss out the idea of hyperacusis, an unusual sensitivity or irritation to some or all sounds. I'm not assuming that you have this, but I don't think this is a well known condition, and a public forum is a good place to bring up information for others to consider.

Most conditions exist in a continuum. Again, I won't assume you have it, but I would say that for anyone who dislikes all music, it is a possibility that they may have a slight undiagnosed version of this. /derail
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Hyperacusis? Maybe. I DO like my peace and quiet:) But I'm not overbothered by traffic noise, or aeroplanes overhead or playgrounds full of noisy children all of which seem to aggravate lots of other people.

Maybe it's a nurture thing as we never had music on in the house when I was younger - although my Dad would listen to music on the radio in a separate room because my Mum didn't care for it much. Or does that make it genetic? Music is very important to my youngest son who is a vocalist (albeit in a heavy metal band) but my daughter has actually wondered aloud if she is 'missing the music gene' as she isn't particularly bothered about it either.

The closest I have come to being really impressed by music is sitting so close to a brass band that everything shook, the room, the floor, me.....WOW.....but that's not really the same as wanting to play CDs of it when I get home.
Maybe I'd better check out that traditional Chinese music after all :)
 
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dann said:
And by the way of Chinese: In recent years it has been disovered that in cultures where meaning in language depends on tonality, nobody is tone deaf. This appears to be a question of nurture only, not of nature: If you grow up in a culture where meaning does not depend on pitch, you risk becoming tone deaf.
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A quick google search reveals many studies indicating that tone deafness is genetic, and this: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/aprilholladay/2005-10-06-tone-deaf-enterprise_x.htm

I find that I am tone-amnesic. Teach me ten Chinese words today and tomorrow I'll remember all of the sounds but none of the tones.
 
aargh57 said:
I was wondering: Is there an evolutionary reason why we like music? Did people that liked the way certain sounds were put together somehow have an advantage? Why exactly do we like music? Anyone who's played an instrument (or anyone else for that matter) can tell when a song or note is out of tune. Did our distant ancestors like the in tune ones and dislike the out of tune ones?
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Your claim that anyone can tell if a note or song is out of tune sounds a little broad to me. I think it is much more learned than innate. Consider how very different folk music from Southeast Asia sounds compared with European folk music. Completely different chords and tonal structures.
 
Roboramma said:
Of course, it might be interesting if there were some adaptive reason behind music. The best speculation I can come up with off the top of my head is that it had something to do with sexual selection:
The ability to produce music requires both good auditory discrimination (being able to hear what sounds good well enough to know if the music you are producing sounds good to others), as well as fine motor control (if you're using some sort of instrument) or vocal control (for singing and wind instruments). All of these might be good advertisements of a mate's quality (from the perspective of natural selection of course).
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I haven't read The Singing Neanderthals ( I now intend to) but it seems to me that HomSap went through a very intensive selection for speech and language ability. Music as we know it may well have evolved over the same period.

The selection can't just be about hunting strategies or tool-making, that wouldn't provide the pressure for HomSap's emergence in such short order. It had to be about getting laid. We all know the importance of "chatting-up" - both chatter and chattee - and it still works. The guys with the conversation and the wit get laid more often than those without. Add a good singing voice, or a musical ability, or best yet both ...

Dance enters into it, of course, "a vertical expression of a horizontal desire", women do watch dancing men's buttocks. It's True! They might not realise it, but I have observed it (not being much of a dancer myself, more of a holding court at the bar and ragging on the music type). Muscles and rugged good looks (however they're currently defined) have their market. Wealth needs no introduction.

Chat, croon, strum a tune ... it scores. I've seen it.
 
Ladewig said:
Your claim that anyone can tell if a note or song is out of tune sounds a little broad to me. I think it is much more learned than innate. Consider how very different folk music from Southeast Asia sounds compared with European folk music. Completely different chords and tonal structures.
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Not that different when compared to the deliberately atonal music developed in the highest strata of the musical world. Foreign mainstream music can sound initially odd, grating even, in comparison to what we're used to but has a similar logic. It doesn't take any effort to get used to it and enjoy it.
 
cyborg said:
We like patterns. Music has a lot of patterns in it. Anyone who has studied musical theory will know this.

I therefore disagree with Athon. The reason pop-music does so well is that it does, on the whole, use a lot of strong pattern based musical structure and does not experiment a lot with dissonance, atonal sounds and such as other genres are more likely to do. It is generally in a 4/4 time signature, has a repeating AB structure and uses a lot of harmonic chord combinations.
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I can't disagree with that; however, that is a feature of a lot of music, not just pop. Why is top 40 pop so popular, while other similar music isn't? Why does pop change styles with time?

At its core, popular music needs to be appealing on a basic level, for the reasons you've suggested. Yet some music is more appealing to different individuals, for the reasons I suggested.

Athon
 
Thanks all for the responses. Very interesting.
I actually like Loss Leader's question better than my own.

As far as what I said about anyone being able to tell if a note is out of tune I probably was too broad on that point. However, I do think that the term "tone deaf" is used much too often. Almost everyone can tell the difference in tones and with a little training people can improve their singing. To say that someone is tone "deaf" implies that they can't tell the difference between one tone and another. If you don't believe me pick up an instrument or a tuner. Play an A note, then b,c,d,e,f and g. I find it very hard to believe that anyone can't tell the difference between a very low note and a very high note. That would be like saying someone can't tell the difference between Johny Cash singing "I walk the Line" and Tiny Tim singing "Tiptoe through the Tuelips" in a high falsetto voice. I realise that some people aren't very good at this but everyone can differentiate between notes and can develop this.

Anyway, sorry about the tangent. I do appreciate the input everyone has given.
 
CapelDodger said:
Not that different when compared to the deliberately atonal music developed in the highest strata of the musical world. Foreign mainstream music can sound initially odd, grating even, in comparison to what we're used to but has a similar logic. It doesn't take any effort to get used to it and enjoy it.
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Doesn't take any effort? I strongly disagree.

I also assert that Americans who are not tone deaf will have a hard time spotting out of tune notes in a fair amount of foreign music.
 
Ladewig said:
Doesn't take any effort? I strongly disagree.

I also assert that Americans who are not tone deaf will have a hard time spotting out of tune notes in a fair amount of foreign music.
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I'm only speaking from personal experience, of course, but when I've had exotic music around me for a while, on the order of a few months I guess, it becomes unexceptional. Even before that, bum notes stand out.

I wouldn't sit down and try to understand a musical form, that strikes me as daft. Music you have to learn to appreciate is pretentious and pointless to my mind; the same applies to any art-form. I'm a philistine, and feel no shame in it.
 
My guess is this is another accidental effect of having a nervous system.

We all have a heartbeat. While we are rarely consciously aware of it , I'm sure wea are subconsciously aware. Rythmic sounds that mimic a heartbeat may well have real , measurable effects on our nervous system that translate into neurochemical production, feelings of pleasure etc.

Some single notes or chords undoubtedly sound concordant and others discordant.

I don't think this implies an evolutionary cause. I think it's just an artifact of the way brains are built.
If the type of sound most pleasing to human systems gets reproduced more by humans than others, we have a memetic argument rather than a natural selection one.
 
Tone Deafness Unknown in China?

dann said:
And by the way of Chinese: In recent years it has been disovered that in cultures where meaning in language depends on tonality, nobody is tone deaf. This appears to be a question of nurture only, not of nature: If you grow up in a culture where meaning does not depend on pitch, you risk becoming tone deaf.
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Perhaps some of you remember William Hung, American Idol's "world's worst" singer of a few years ago. It shold be easy to find videos of him online. Tone deaf? Probably.

Speaking Chinese doesn't involve hitting any precise notes, just organizing the relative up and down pitches. The exact musical interval is irrelevant.

My working definition of tone deafness is someone who may know if a pitch is higher or lower than another but can't match it without some artificial aid. I've had tone deaf friends who, when they sang, thought they were hitting the notes just fine but were only getting the rough rise and fall of the pitches.

It's possible pitch perception is a matter of degree, not a binary have or have not. All a person needs to sound in pitch is to have pitch perception equal to or better than whoever is listening. You can tell if someone's pitch perception is worse than yours, but you can't tell if someone's is better than yours. This is an important principle I've coined the "law of incompetence." In many areas, you can much more easily tell if someone is inferior to you than superior.

In summary, tone deafness IMO is relative, not absolute. Are there fewer tone deaf people in China than in the West? Probably. None? Unlikely.
 
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Music -- a Virus of the Mind?

I'm working on a thesis that music is a "virus of the mind" like religion. Notice how a great tune makes you want to share it with others? Notice how it can repeat in your mind until you feel you are about to go crazy? How you want all your friends to have the same taste in music that you do? Notice how it's a multi-billion dollar industry and does not directly benefit society in any material way? It's not hard to make a case for music as a parasite of humanity.

Before any of you go ad hominem on me, I'd like to affirm that I'm a lifelong musician and made money both performing and composing music. But on the whole, it's consumed countless hours that in summary paid off very little.

I'd enjoy hearing arguments against the parasite theory of music.

Thanks in advance...
 
I was under the impression that we liked the 1/12 system because thats how our ears worked, dividing into octaves and then 1/12 of octaves

Who knows...I spent my entire life in the music bizz and cant stand listening to anything but talk radio

Hopefully there is some evolutionary justification for my existence, I often think what I do is a waste of time and a load of crap, but its what I LOVE to do!
 
I don't know if I agree with all the ideas here about how it first happened that we like music. But I would say that there has been a great deal of reproductive pressure to like music for much of the existence of culture. Music has long been a very central aspect of social interaction. And social interaction is so primary in our species as to nearly be a necessary part of the mating process.
 
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