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Last September, I wrote a couple of posts on the natural desire for music and on the political history of Beethoven's 9th Symphony.
I argued that the desire for music is one of the 20 natural desires of our evolved human nature. It belongs to the category of "aesthetic pleasure from art, music, dance, and storytelling." But to explain the evolution of music, we need to distinguish music and musicality. While musicality is biologically universal, music is culturally variable. Musicality includes components such as melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic cognition; and it is that part of our biological nature that gives human beings in all cultures the capacity and the propensity to generate and enjoy all forms of music. But music in all its variety is culturally constructed through the biological power of human musicality. Music then is like language in its biological universality and cultural diversity. All human beings normally have a biological instinct for learning and using a language. But different human beings will learn different languages in different cultures.
There are at least five evolutionary theories of music. For me, the most persuasive one proposes the social-bonding hypothesis that human musicality is a coevolved system for social bonding. As already indicated, musicality denotes the biological capacities of all human beings that allow us to perceive and produce music. Social bonding refers to all kinds of affiliative connections that bind two or more people into a group. Coevolved means that musicality has evolved through a process of gene-culture coevolution. In my post from last September, I surveyed the five kinds of evidence for this social-bonding theory.
Since Patrick Savage (a professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand) is one of the leading proponents of this theory, I was pleased to see that Oxford University Press has just published his new book--Comparative Musicology: Evolution, Universals, and the Science of the World's Music. Remarkably, this book is freely available as a downloadable pdf file at go.nature.com/4akfrne).
Savage has outlined some of his thoughts in that book in an article--"Music Is Not a Universal Language--But It Can Bring Us Together When Words Fail," Nature 650 (2026): 819-822. He briefly considers five questions.
1. What can science say about music? Some scientists have found in cross-cultural anthropological studies evidence that all cultures have something that we can identify as music, which seems to show that music is the "universal language of mankind," as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow observed in 1835. But some ethnomusicologists have argued that cultural diversity is so deep that there cannot be any human universals. And others have argued that even if music were universal in some sense, its meanings might not be. The debate comes down to how we define "music" and "universal."
2. Can we define music? In 1997, some ethnomusicologists recorded the sounds of some men in Papua New Guinea engaged in a secret ritual. It was described as "sounds of large and small friction blocks, a swung slat, ribbon reeds, and human moaners" (see go.nature.com/4abgwjp). The ethnomusicologists who recorded this thought it was music. Since this was part of a secret ceremony, the men did not disclose its meaning. Nor did they even say whether they considered it to be music. Savage says these sounds do not satisfy a working definition of music as "sound organized into regular pitches or rhythms," which characterizes 99% of the world's music.
3. Is music uniquely human? While spoken language is unique to human beings, Savage observes, singing and dancing are not. Some capacity for singing is found in songbirds and cetaceans. And dancing--synchronized movements to a beat--is shared with other animals--like the dancing cockatoo Snowball.
4. Is music a universal language? Cross-cultural studies have shown that listeners from distant cultures can sometimes detect some of the intended emotional meanings in each other's music. For example, "fast and energetic music tends to be perceived as happier and is more likely to accompany dancing, whereas slow and less energetic music is often considered sadder and more likely to be used in calming genres, including lullabies."
But this is not always the case. In one study led by Elizabeth Margulis at Princeton University, scientists curated a same of 32 instrumental music recordings--16 by Western composers and 16 by Chinese ones. They then asked some 600 participants in the United States and China to describe the kinds of story they imagined as they listened to the music. For instance, when they listened to an excerpt from Guan Pinghu's Strains of Spring Morning, some Americans thought of "cowboys," while some Chinese people thought of "sorrow" (see go.nature.com/4rvzyw6). Then, when they heard an excerpt from Ferde Grofe's Sunrise from his Grand Canyon Suite, some Americans heard "birds," while some Chinese people heard "man" (see go.nature.com/46dfoyj). Like those other Americans, I definitely hear "birds." But that could be because I know the title is Sunrise.
This seems to show that music cannot be "the universal language of mankind" in any literal sense because the narrative meanings of musical sounds are not transmitted clearly across cultures. Savage concludes from this that "while music is universal, its meaning is not."
5. Is music beyond words? Even though music is not a universal language, Savage argues, it can still be used to improve cross-cultural understanding, because the near universality of music is not in its meaning but in its structure. Savage et al. (2015) have identified 18 features of musical structure that are widespread in all or almost all cultures. And here "widespread" means they are "statistical universals"--that is, nearly universal but not absolutely. Most of these support coordinated music-making:
Throughout the world, humans tend to sing, play percussion instruments, and dance to simple, repetitive music in groups, and this is facilitated by the widespread use of simple-integer pitch and rhythm ratios, scales based on a limited number of discrete pitches (usually no more than 7), and isochronomous beats grouped in multiples of two or three. . . . The widespread use of simple, discrete meters and scales also enables multiple people to memorize and coordinate their performances. These widespread musical properties have few direct parallels in language. Group coordination provides a common purpose that unifies the cross-cultural structural regularities of human music (Savage et al., 2021, 8).
This is impressive cross-cultural evidence for the near universality of musicality as an evolved instinct of human nature that supports social bonding.
Savage explains:
These statistical universals are important because they can help us to synchronize and harmonize our singing, dancing or playing to diverse types of music from around the world, even if we have no idea of the intended meaning of the piece. I have experienced this while participating in genres as diverse as Inuit throat-singing, Ghanaian highlife, Japanese Bon dancing, Māori haka, Papua New Guinean song and Senegalese drumming.
An indication of the intercultural universality of music is how musical traditions from around the world can be blended in pleasing ways. For me, the most exciting example of this was when my wife and I attended a performance of Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Illinois, some years ago. The Silk Road Ensemble combines Western and Eastern styles of music. Yo Yo Ma has said that this is his attempt to show how music can bring people from different cultures together as an expression of a shared humanity.
Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
A similar example of intercultural music making is related by Savage. He tells the story of several hundred music scholars from around the world gathering in Wellington, New Zealand, for a conference. Savage lives in Wellington, and he invited some of these scholars to his home for food and drinks, after which they started singing and playing music from their home countries. He writes:
My favorite moment was when a colleague who was attending this conference for the first time, Gedisa Jacob, who researches music at the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies in Port Moresby, started to sing a song from his home in Morobe province (see go.nature.com/4aaxbma). At first, the rest of us just listened. But as he moved into the chorus, which used non-linguistic "vocables" such as "oh yah oh" (similar to "tra la la" in English songs), I felt like I was starting to understand the rhythmic and melodic structure, which used the same five-note (pentatonic) scale and four-beat meter found in many songs worldwide.
I started to join in, harmonizing with his melody on the piano. One of the other guests, Cara Brasted, started to improvise her own complementary melody on the violin. My dad, Mike Savage, started to improvise on his guitar and my student, Marin Naruse, joined in on her sanshin (an instrument originating from her home, the Amami Islands in Japan). Gradually, more of us joined in, singing and playing together: "Oh yah ooooh oh yah oh."
None of us, other than Jacob, had any idea what the song was about. Afterwards, he explained that it concerns the mayam tree, the leaves of which his people use to make traditional medicines.
But it really didn't matter. Singing and playing these near-universal scales and rhythms collectively had bonded us together in ways that couldn't be expressed in words. That is the power of music. Music is not a universal language--but it can bring us together when words fail.
But then Savage concludes by suggesting that Darwin might have been right in proposing that language originally evolved out of music: "Even if music is not a universal language, it might hold the key to understanding the origins of language--and perhaps even what makes us human."
Imagine that our earliest Paleolithic ancestors had music but not language. And then one day, while they were making music together, someone sang "Oh yah ooooh oh yah oh." Could that singing have become the words of a protolanguage--once they agreed to associate "Oh yah ooooh oh yah oh" with the leaves of a tree that had some medicinal powers?
A similar thought is suggested by Beethoven's 9th Symphony. When the baritone soloist first shouted "Oh friends, not these sounds!", that was the first time that a singing voice had entered a symphony. The search for "more joyful sounds" required a combination of instrumental and vocal music--a choral symphony. Thus did the 9th Symphony perhaps suggest the evolutionary emergence of language out of music through singing.
The natural desire for speech could thus have evolved out of the natural desire for music.
