Iv Theories of Music Origin

Analysis of the phrase structure and phonological properties of musical and linguistic utterances suggests that music and language evolved from a common ancestor, something I refer to as the “musilanguage” stage. In this view, the many structural features shared between music and language are the result of their emergence from a joint evolutionary precursor rather than from fortuitous parallelism or from one function begetting the other. Music and language are seen as reciprocal specializations of a dual-natured referential emotive communicative precursor, whereby music emphasizes sound as emotive meaning and language emphasizes sound as referential meaning. The musilanguage stage must have at least three properties for it to qualify as both a precursor and scaffold for the evolution of music and language: lexical tone, combinatorial phrase formation, and expressive phrasing mechanisms. Beyond Music-Language Metaphors Theories of music origin come in two basic varieties: structural models and functional models. Structural models look to the acoustic properties of music as outgrowths of homologous precursor functions, whereas functional models look to the adaptive roles of music as determinants of its structural design features. This chapter presents a structural model of music evolution. Functional models are presented elsewhere (Brown in press). Before discussing music from an evolutionary perspective, it is important to note that two different modes of perceiving, producing, and responding to musical sound patterns exist, one involving emotive meaning and the other involving referential meaning. These I call, respectively, the acoustic and vehicle modes. The acoustic mode refers to the immediate, on-line, emotive aspect of sound perception and production. It deals with the emotive interpretation of musical sound patterns through two processes that I call “sound emotion” and “sentic modulation.” It is an inextricably acoustic mode of operation. The vehicle mode refers to the off-line, referential form of sound perception and production. It is a representational mode of music operation that results from the influence of human linguistic capacity on music cognition. The vehicle mode includes the contexts of musical performance and contents of musical works, where both of these involve complex systems of cultural meaning (see footnote 2 for details). This distinction between the acoustic and vehicle modes addresses an important issue in contemporary musicology: the conflict between absolutists, who view music as pure sound-emotion, and referentialists, who 16 The “Musilanguage” Model of Music Evolution