Prenatal “experience” and the phylogenesis and ontogenesis of music

Abstract

Allow me to begin by explaining the inverted commas in my title. We may confidently suppose that the fetus does not “experience” anything at all — at least not in the everyday sense If you say, for example, “On our trip to Baden we experienced the wonderful park next to the Congress Casino”, this would be a reflexion about your “experience” in the everyday sense of the word. It is reasonable to assume, and perhaps even obvious, that the fetus is unable to reflect in this manner. So the word “experience” is a little misleading. More precisely, I will be talking about fetal perception, cognition and emotion, and what these aspects of “experience” might have to do with the origins of music. Moreover, I will consider both the phylogenetic aspect (evolutionary developments over many generations) and the ontogenetic aspect (individual developments within a single lifespan) of this question.