Music for reproduction and survival

I told myself I would not try to write any blog entries during the holiday season.  The plan was to kick back and reflect on the first few months of Owning The Stage, what turned out to be interesting and what didn't, and thereby to come up with a plan for 2009.  However, The Economist published a really interesting article on one of my pet topics, namely the purpose of music in Society, and I had to bring it to your attention, dear reader, and add a comment or two.

If you have fifteen minutes, you should probably read the whole article, but if you're busy let me give you the whirlwind tour.

Music is really important for humans.  You can tell because it's very time consuming and expensive for Society to produce and consume it as much as we do.  But what purpose does it serve?  There are three competing theories.

Theory number one goes like this: music gives the performer a better chance to reproduce, so generation by generation that advantage breeds more musical people.  I like this theory, even if it's a bit self-serving to do so!  I live in two circles, a musical and performance one, and a computer science one, and I have certainly noticed that the people who know me as a performer respond to me quite differently.  When Realtime is singing somewhere, we all get attention from the opposite sex.  We're all quite married, of course, but the attention doesn't go unnoticed!  It's just not the same when I attend a computer-related conference.  And not just because everyone there is male.

Theory number two is that music serves to bind together groups, and creates a survival advantage in that way.  I think we can all corroborate that one too - if you're a musician, I would bet dimes to dollars that you have a clique built up around the style of music that you sing or play.  Imagine the power of that force in prehistoric times to keep the tribe together, and determine who was in, and who was out.  Makes sense.

Number three I don't much care for.  It states that our ability to comprehend and perform music is an accident - we evolved those mental capacities for other reasons.  Stephen Pinker says basically this: A brain devoted to turning sound into meaning is tickled by an oversupply of tone, melody and rhythm. Singing is auditory masturbation to satisfy this craving. Playing musical instruments is auditory pornography.

However, perhaps they are all partly right.  As the article suggets, perhaps we evolved the musical capacity for other reasons, but then put them to good evolutionary use, for reproduction and survival.  I can buy that.

Of more importance to the performer is the following:

What all of these hypotheses have in common is the ability of music to manipulate the emotions, and this is the most mysterious part of all. That some sounds lead to sadness and others to joy is the nub of all three hypotheses. The singing lover is not merely demonstrating his prowess; he also seeks to change his beloved’s emotions.

Once we understand more clearly the way that music functions in the brain to create emotions in the listener, the performing arts will no doubt be able to exploit that information to create more impactful performances.  But for the time being, we'll just have to stick with what works, and learn more by trial and error!