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 laodan rated 26 months ago - Survival of the harmonious
via arts&letters daily, in The Boston Globe Online by Drake Bennett
The evolutionary benefits of our affinity for food (nutrition) and sex (procreation) are easy enough to explain, but music is trickier. It has become one of the great puzzles in the field of evolutio...
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2 Reviews
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- laodan rated 26 months ago
- Survival of the harmonious
via arts&letters daily, in The Boston Globe Online by Drake Bennett
The evolutionary benefits of our affinity for food (nutrition) and sex (procreation) are easy enough to explain, but music is trickier. It has become one of the great puzzles in the field of evolutionary psychology, a controversial discipline dedicated to determining the adaptive roots of aspects of modern behavior, from child-rearing to religion.
Some evolutionary psychologists suggest that music originated as a way for males to impress and attract females. Others see its roots in the relationship between mother and child. In a third hypothesis, music was a social adhesive, helping to forge common identity in early human communities.
URL: Survival of the harmonious
Another good source.
URL: Your brain on music
Many hypotheses are being presented by the scientific community as to the "how and why" of the origins of music . But none is completely satisfactory. Perhaps the most widely touted explanation, though, is that music arose as a way for groups of early humans to create a sense of community.
Creating a sense of community was for sure a necessity for the survival of early humans and music certainly played a role in shaping this sense of belonging to the group but this only relates to the societal functionality served by music during a given evolutionary period. What about its present-day societal functionality? It still serves as bonding individuals into groups but there is undeniably a lot more more at work here in the satisfaction experienced by the isolated individual.
In my book artsense I submit that music and visual arts are "genetically", or otherwise, transmitting to individuals and their societies the visual and sound track left along the road of evolution by all successfully retained forms. This "evolutionary harmony" then is adapted, in any given period, into visual arts and in musical forms that fulfill the most efficient societal role in that given time.
- nobbynobbs rated 26 months ago
- An interesting read.
"Mounting evidence suggests that human beings are hard-wired to appreciate music. What researchers want to know now is why our distant ancestors evolved music in the first place."
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