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Music as a coevolved system for social bonding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2020

Patrick E. Savage
Affiliation:
Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University, Fujisawa 252-0882, Japan psavage@sfc.keio.ac.jp; http://PatrickESavage.com
Psyche Loui
Affiliation:
College of Arts, Media and Design, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA p.loui@northeastern.edu; http://www.psycheloui.com
Bronwyn Tarr
Affiliation:
Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology & Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6PN, UK bronwyn.tarr@anthro.ox.ac.uk; bronwyntarr01@gmail.com https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-bronwyn-tarr
Adena Schachner
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA; schachner@ucsd.edu; https://madlab.ucsd.edu
Luke Glowacki
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA glowacki@fas.harvard.edu; https://www.hsb-lab.org/
Steven Mithen
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AB, UK s.j.mithen@reading.ac.uk; http://www.reading.ac.uk/archaeology/about/staff/s-j-mithen.aspx
W. Tecumseh Fitch
Affiliation:
Department of Behavioral and Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna, Vienna 1090, Austria. tecumseh.fitch@univie.ac.at; https://homepage.univie.ac.at/tecumseh.fitch/

Abstract

Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archeology, anthropology, biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience into a unified framework that accounts for the biological and cultural evolution of music. We argue that the evolution of musicality involves gene–culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors that initially arose and spread as cultural inventions had feedback effects on biological evolution because of their impact on social bonding. We emphasize the deep links between production, perception, prediction, and social reward arising from repetition, synchronization, and harmonization of rhythms and pitches, and summarize empirical evidence for these links at the levels of brain networks, physiological mechanisms, and behaviors across cultures and across species. Finally, we address potential criticisms and make testable predictions for future research, including neurobiological bases of musicality and relationships between human music, language, animal song, and other domains. The music and social bonding hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music.

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Target Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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