Without a Song

The Heart Has Reasons,

I'll never know what makes the rain to fall

I'll never know what makes the grass so tall

I only know there ain't no love at all

Without a song!!

That Reason Itself Knows Nothing Of.

Did music precede language in the development of the human species? What were the evolutionary and cognitive forces that shaped man’s musical behavior and the rich comprehensive catalog of musical structures? What is music for, and why does every human culture have it? What are the universal features of music and musical behavior across cultures?

As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed. They are present, though in a very rude and as it appears almost latent condition, in men of all races, even the most savage. . . . Whether or not the half-human progenitors of man possessed, like the before-mentioned gibbon, the capacity of producing, and no doubt of appreciating, musical notes, we have every reason to believe that man possessed these faculties at a very remote period, for singing and music are extremely ancient arts.

—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)

Mythology is wrong. Music is not the merciful gift of benevolent gods or heroes. Wrong is the banal desire to see all slow, imperceptible germination emerge readymade from the head of a single inventor; music is not the clever exploit of some ingenious man. And wrong, so far, are the many theories presented on a more or less scientific basis—the theories that man has imitated the warbling of birds, that he wanted to please the opposite sex, that his singing derived from drawn-out signaling shouts, that he arrived at music via some coordinated, rhythmical teamwork, and other speculative hypotheses. Were they true, some of the most primitive survivors of early mankind would have preserved a warbling style of song, or love songs, or signal-like melodies, or rhythmical teamwork with rhythmical worksongs. Which they hardly have. To call living primitives to the witness stand will at first sight bewilder those who are not familiar with modern methods of settling questions of origin. They probably would prefer the more substantial, indeed irrefutable, proofs of prehistorians, who excavate the tombs and dwelling places of races bygone. But not even the earliest civilizations that have left their traces in the depths of the earth are old enough to betray the secret of the origins of music.

—Curt Sachs, Our Musical Heritage (1948)

Neither conventional neuroscience nor aesthetics can explain the deep emotional power of music to move humans to action.

An alternative view is presented, in which human brains are seen to have evolved primarily in response to environmental pressures to bridge the solipsistic gulf between individuals, and to form integrated societies. An evolutionary origin is found in the neurohumoral mechanisms of parental bonding to altricial infants. A case is made that music together with dance have co-evolved biologically and culturally to serve as a technology of social bonding. Findings of anthropologists and psychiatrists are reviewed to show how the rhythmic behavioral activities that are induced by drum beats and music can lead to altered states of consciousness, through which mutual trust among members of societies is engendered.

—Walter J. Freeman, A neurobiological role of music in social bonding 1998

The Human Affinity for Music

What then is our understanding of the evolutionary precursors of human music, the evolution of the hominid vocal tract, localization of brain function, the structure of acoustic-communication signals, symbolic gesture, emotional manipulation through sound, self-expression, creativity, the human affinity for the spiritual, and the human attachment to music itself.

-The Origins of Music, Edited by Nils L. Wallin, Björn Merker and Steven Brown

In his book "The Singing Neanderthals" Professor Steven Mithen writes:

In this book I am not concerned with the specific music that we like but with the fact that we like it at all - that we spend a great deal of time, effort and often money to listen to it, that many people practice so hard to perform it, and that we admire and often idolize those who do so with expertise, originality and flair.

The explanation has to be more profound than merely invoking our upbringing and the society in which we live, although these may largely account for our specific musical tastes. The appreciation of music is a universal feature of humankind; music-making is found in all societies and it is normal for everyone to participate in some manner... Rather than looking at sociological or historical factors, we can only explain the human propensity to make and listen to music by recognizing that it has been encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species…

While several other universal attributes of the human mind have recently been examined and debated at length, notably our capacities for language and creative thought, music has been sorely neglected. Accordingly, a fundamental aspect of the human condition has been ignored and we have gained no more than a partial understanding of what it means to be human…

This might be simply because music is so much harder to address. Whereas language has a self-evident function - the transmission of information - and can be readily accepted as a product of evolution even if its specific evolutionary history remains unclear, what is the point of music? That question leads us to a further neglected area: emotion. If music is about anything, it is about expressing and inducing emotion. But while archaeologists have put significant effort into examining the intellectual capacities of our ancestors, their emotional lives have remained as neglected as their music. This, too, has constrained our understanding of how the capacity for language evolved.