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Why musical hierarchies?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2021

Courtney B. Hilton Open the ORCID record for Courtney B. Hilton [Opens in a new window] ,
Rie Asano Open the ORCID record for Rie Asano [Opens in a new window]  and
Cedric Boeckx Open the ORCID record for Cedric Boeckx [Opens in a new window]
Courtney B. Hilton
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. courtneyhilton@g.harvard.edu School of Psychology, The University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW 2006, Australia
Rie Asano
Affiliation:
Institute of Musicology, Systematic Musicology, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Cologne, Germany rie.asano@uni-koeln.de
Cedric Boeckx
Affiliation:
ICREA (Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies and Research)/Universitat de Barcelona, Section of General Linguistics/Universitat de Barcelona Institute for Complex Systems (UBICS), Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 585, 08007 Barcelona, Spain. cedric.boeckx@ub.edu
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Abstract

Credible signaling may have provided a selection pressure for producing and discriminating increasingly elaborate proto-musical signals. But, why evolve them to have hierarchical structure? We argue that the hierarchality of tonality and meter is a byproduct of domain-general mechanisms evolved for reasons other than credible signaling.

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Open Peer Commentary
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Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 44 , 2021 , e100
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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