Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2020
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.
We are delighted to present an unusual BBS publication. In early 2018, we received a double submission: two papers exploring the same topic from different perspectives – “Origins of Music in Credible Signaling,” by Samuel A. Mehr, Max M. Krasnow, Gregory A. Bryant, and Edward H. Hagen; and “Music as a Co-evolved System for Social Bonding,” by Patrick E. Savage, Psyche Loui, Bronwyn Tarr, Adena Schachner, Luke Glowacki, Steven Mithen, and W. Tecumseh Fitch. Each paper was reviewed in parallel, but independently, and both ultimately accepted. Our intention was to encourage consideration of how complex subjects like music might be investigated in different ways, integrating the perspectives of different laboratories and multiple commentators.
Thus, invited commentators might respond to the Mehr et al. article, the Savage et al. article, or both. Most chose both, as hoped. Unlike the usual BBS article presentation, the two target articles, two commentary groups and responses are interleaved. Follow the links above to find the companion target article and for the index of commentaries and responses. – The Editors
Target article
Origins of music in credible signaling
Related commentaries (60)
A boldly comparative approach will strengthen co-evolutionary accounts of musicality's origins
A neurodevelopmental disorders perspective into music, social attention, and social bonding
Against unitary theories of music evolution
An evolutionary theory of music needs to care about developmental timing
Ancestral human mother–infant interaction was an adaptation that gave rise to music and dance
Beyond “consistent with” adaptation: Is there a robust test for music adaptation?
Bonding system in nonhuman primates and biological roots of musicality
Bonds and signals underlie the music learning experience
Challenging infant-directed singing as a credible signal of maternal attention
Clarifying the link between music and social bonding by measuring prosociality in context
Credible signalling and social bonds: Ultimately drawing on the same idea
Ecological and psychological factors in the cultural evolution of music
Evolutionary linguistics can help refine (and test) hypotheses about how music might have evolved
Functional and evolutionary parallels between birdsong and human musicality
Human evolution of gestural messaging and its critical role in the human development of music
If it quacks like a duck: The by-product account of music still stands
If music be the food of love, play on: Four ways that music may lead to social connection
Is neural entrainment to rhythms the basis of social bonding through music?
Is the MSB hypothesis (music as a coevolved system for social bonding) testable in the Popperian sense?
Isochrony, vocal learning, and the acquisition of rhythm and melody
Knowledge songs as an evolutionary adaptation to facilitate information transmission through music
Making music: Let's not be too quick to abandon the byproduct hypothesis
Mind the gap: The mediating role of emotion mechanisms in social bonding through musical activities
Music and dance are two parallel routes for creating social cohesion
Music as a social bond in patients with amnesia
Music as a trait in evolutionary theory: A musicological perspective
Music as social bonding: A cross-cultural perspective
Music production deficits and social bonding: The case of poor-pitch singing
Music's putative adaptive function hinges on a combination of distinct mechanisms
Music, attachment, and uncertainty: Music as communicative interaction
Music, bonding, and human evolution: A critique
Music, groove, and play
Musical bonds are orthogonal to symbolic language and norms
Musical features emerging from a biocultural musicality
Musicality as a predictive process
Musicality was not selected for, rather humans have a good reason to learn music
Not by signalling alone: Music's mosaicism undermines the search for a proper function
Oxytocin as an allostatic agent in the social bonding effects of music
Pluralism provides the best chance for addressing big questions about music
Pre-hunt charade as the cradle of human musicality
Progress without exclusion in the search for an evolutionary basis of music
Rapid dissonant grunting, or, but why does music sound the way it does?
Sex and drugs and rock and roll
Signaling games and music as a credible signal
Singing is not associated with social complexity across species
Social bonding and credible signaling hypotheses largely disregard the gap between animal vocalizations and human music
Social bonding and music: Evidence from lesions to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex
Sound sleep: Lullabies as a test case for the neurobiological effects of music
The evolution of music as artistic cultural innovation expressing intuitive thought symbolically
The evolution of music: One trait, many ultimate-level explanations
The evolutionary benefit of less-credible affective musical signals for emotion induction during storytelling
The music and social bonding hypothesis does require multilevel selection
The origins of music in (musi)language
Understanding the origins of musicality requires reconstructing the interactive dance between music-specific adaptations, exaptations, and cultural creations
Unravelling the origins of musicality: Beyond music as an epiphenomenon of language
What's not music, but feels like music to you?
Where they sing solo: Accounting for cross-cultural variation in collective music-making in theories of music evolution
Why don't cockatoos have war songs?
Why language survives as the dominant communication tool: A neurocognitive perspective
Why musical hierarchies?
Author response
Toward a productive evolutionary understanding of music
Toward inclusive theories of the evolution of musicality