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Language, Music, Fire, and Chess: Remarks on Music Evolution and Acquisition

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Language, Music, and Computing (LMAC 2015)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 561))

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Abstract

There is considerable debate about the evolution of both language and music cognition in human beings (see [10, 13, 24, 25] for the former, and [6, 11, 21, 33] for the latter). However, the two debates have distinct characters. In the case of language, most agree that there exists a significant biological component to the underlying cognitive system that modern humans enjoy, which in some form was either the direct or indirect product of evolutionary changes in biology. In the case of music, however, human ability in this domain has recently been compared to mastery of fire (an obvious cultural invention) [21] and specifically dismissed as not arising through evolutionary forces, understood in the standard Darwinian sense. Patel’s primary arguments [21] for this relate to childhood acquisition, which he argues occurs quite differently for language and music. In particular, he claims that there is no critical period for acquisition of music perception. I examine his arguments here, coming to quite different conclusions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    From here on, I will assume “music” to mean familiar music within one’s native musical “idiom”, such as Western tonal music for presumably most, if not all, readers of this article. This is not to trivialize the significance of research into musical universals, non-tonal systems, polyphonic music and so on. See [17] for important discussion of this same assumption.

  2. 2.

    Signals from other domains might, of course, combine in our emotional reaction to perceived music, but I contend that such interactions involve cognitive connections across domains, and they certainly do not affect the basic workings of the independent modules.

  3. 3.

    That tonal pitch space is unique to human music in its basic abstract properties is not denied by Patel. Rather, Patel sidesteps the issue of domain specificity by arguing that modularity itself is not evidence of an evolutionary adaptation (see next section).

  4. 4.

    This is not to deny the importance of understanding technical musical skills, musical creativity, output abilities and so on. I return to those issues in the conclusion.

  5. 5.

    Perhaps his claim stems from the difficult task of determining what adaptionist pressure might have helped music develop in human evolution. However, Patel does not enter into the debate over language evolution, and to conclude that some sort of evolutionary pressures were involved in the development of human musical processing ability would not commit him to a particular story.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, Stony Brook University, New York, USA

    John Frederick Bailyn

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  1. John Frederick Bailyn
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Correspondence to John Frederick Bailyn .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Saint Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Polina Eismont

  2. University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, United Kingdom

    Natalia Konstantinova

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Bailyn, J.F. (2015). Language, Music, Fire, and Chess: Remarks on Music Evolution and Acquisition. In: Eismont, P., Konstantinova, N. (eds) Language, Music, and Computing. LMAC 2015. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 561. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27498-0_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27498-0_3

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