Why Music? The Economist Dec 18, 2008

[vainika]

Note 1: If there is an issue with posting the article here, please retain the URL and delete the rest of the text. Thanks!

Note 2: The term 'fitness', as used in this article, refers to reproductive success, not physical fitness.



============================================
Human evolution

Why music?
Dec 18th 2008
From The Economist print edition
http://www.economist.com/printedition/P ... d=12795510


Biologists are addressing one of humanity’s strangest attributes, its all-singing, all-dancing culture


"IF MUSIC be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it."

[MaheshS]

Is it just me who thinks it's a pointless article? It's just stating the obvious. Most of the "points" made me just say "No S***t Sherlock".

[vidya]

A very interesting article. However, for the sake of completeness of perspective, I thought I should add another rather out of the box albeit controversial POV on Evolutionary psychology ( and its latest avatar the pop EP) .

http://drbeetle.homestead.com/music.html

(I thought the parsimony/need to organize point makes sense particularly w.r.to Classical music)

http://drbeetle.homestead.com/topten.html (See items 7 and 11)

[vasanthakokilam]

Mahesh, I understand what you are saying but the question of 'why' for obvious observations is the most difficult one. Millions of hours of people's time have been similarly spent on such questions on 'language'. The research area of course is to come up with plausible reasons that can be traced back to selection pressures for survival.

So, here is the hypothesis that is on the table.

Sound to Music vs Basic Hunger to Cheescake: The point is, You need to eat to survive but you do not need cheesecake but we still very much like cheescake. The explanation is 'over shooting'. Same thing with Sound. Ability to interpret sound is very important for survival. You do not need Music but we still very much like music. The explanation is 'over shooting'.

But here is my problem. Music perception is due to two fundamental things. The logarithmic nature of the Octave ( X, 2X, 4X, 8X ) and the linear nature of harmonics ( X, 2X, 3X, 4X, 5X ).
Our ears are equipped with instrumentation to directly perceive the logarithmic sounds. If all is required is for mere sound perception, why should it overshoot so much as to evolve a whole transducer to convert logarithmic signals. That is where the 'over shoot' argument is not convincing to me.

[vainika]

A very interesting article. However, for the sake of completeness of perspective, I thought I should add another rather out of the box albeit controversial POV on Evolutionary psychology ( and its latest avatar the pop EP) .

http://drbeetle.homestead.com/music.html

(I thought the parsimony/need to organize point makes sense particularly w.r.to Classical music)

http://drbeetle.homestead.com/topten.html (See items 7 and 11)

Vidya, while I'm not a huge fan of evolutionary psychology, I'd argue that looking for evolutionary origins is in itself not a problem: resorting to unverifiable adaptive (function x evolved for purpose y) explanations is.

Making comparisons among closely related species, such as Dunbar's work relating neocortex volume to group size in primates, does allow one to propose a parsimonious explanation. For example, a hypothesis of species evolution that postulates Function x evolved once in the ancestor of a cluster of species, is more parsimonious than proposing multiple independent origins of the trait in each of the species.

The DrBeetle site does offer some valid critiques of EvolPsych but has its share of hokeyness, vide the 'wildness' concept.

[Musique4ever]

I had written something with the same title in reverse......Music ! Why ? around a decade and a half ago. Here it is, for what it is worth

http://ramavarma.synthasite.com/music-why.php