Hypothesis: Music Evolved from Protomusic by Loss of Function
The function of Protomusic was communication.
Music feels like it’s communication, but pragmatically we do not use music to communicate things to other people.
The reason music is like this is because its ancestral form was a system of communication, but some of the components of that system have disappeared, or at least have been disrupted.
A more specific hypothesis about protomusic can give us a clue about which specific function was lost.
An important observation about music is that strong musical items have qualia. That is, a strong musical item causes the listener to have the experience of listening to that item of music which feels qualitatively different to anything else, even other music.
This suggests strongly that the identity of musical items is important. Yet if music is just something that we listen to because we enjoy it, or because it causes an altered state of mind, it’s unclear why the identity of any specific musical item should matter so much.
A possible explanation is that the identity of protomusical items did matter, in the past, because protomusical items had actual specific and culturally determined meanings.
Protomusical items also had accompanying emotional feelings, in the same way that musical items create emotional feelings.
So the specific meanings of protomusical items had to be consistent with those emotional feelings (in the same way that modern song lyrics have to be consistent with the emotional feeling of the melody and accompaniment).
But the actual specific meanings were culturally determined, just like the meanings of words are culturally determined.
In practice this process of determination had to involve some mechanism of learning the meanings of the protomusical items by observing how and when other people used them (just like, presumably, children learn the meanings of words and grammar by a similar kind of observation).
A second hypothesis about protomusical communication is that any instance of communication has to provoke some kind of response in the listener. This response might involve some direct action to deal with whatever the communication is about, or, it might just involve thinking about what response should or could be made to deal with the situation. (This second hypothesis will be relevant when I consider an additional hypothesis about loss of function below.)
Maybe Protomusic sounded just like Music
In considering “Protomusic” as a hypothetical ancestor of Music, one might suppose that the evolution of Protomusic into Music involved changes in how it sounded.
However, if we observe the existence of strong identity in modern items of music, and if identity was relevant to the function of protomusical items, then it follows that those features of music which determine this identity had to already exist in Protomusic.
This suggests that the evolution of Protomusic into Music did not involve any major alteration to how it sounded, but rather involved an alteration in how our ancestors responded to it.
Why Did Protomusic Lose Its Function as Communication?
I am proposing that Protomusic as a system of communication evolved into Music which is not a system of communication.
But why would a species of social intelligent animals lose a system of communication?
The only plausible answer this question is that a better system of communication took its place.
And in our particular case it’s obvious what this better system of communication was – word-based language.
But there is a slightly odd relationship between word-based language and music, which is that most popular music consists of songs which consist of word-based language embedded into music.
Which raises a question: Is that how word-based language evolved? Ie did it evolve as something contained within protomusic, and then at some point it “escaped” the embedding to no longer be contained within the protomusic? (And surviving only as words embedded in music, which, it is worth noting, is not a pragmatic form of communication. That is, words are part of a pragmatic system of communication, but when you put them into non-communicative music, somehow the non-communicativeness of the music contaminates the words, and they also cease to be pragmatically communicative.)
To understand why word-based language is better than a protomusical language based on melodic identity, we only need to consider how many melodies might exist in any prehistoric society. In the modern world, with all the technology, and the sheer size of the world population that we can draw music from, we might have some familiarity with thousands of distinct musical items. But in earlier times, before the development of modern technology and complex societies, the number of distinct musical items that members of a tribe knew might only be a few dozen, or a few hundred at the most.
And melodies are not constructed into more complex utterances in the same way that words are constructed into complex sentences.
In effect, one melody is going to express one meaning, out of at most a few hundred possible meanings, and it’s going to take a certain amount of time to express that meaning.
If word-based language does not suffer these limitations, how come our ancestors didn’t just evolve word-based language straightaway?
The observation about words being embedded into music suggests a possible answer to this question: words initially evolved as an enhancement to protomusic.
So protomusical items could express maybe one of a few hundred meanings, but words could be added to protomusic to add further information to what was being expressed.
In this model of evolution of word-based language, there is no need for words and grammar to evolve de novo – the initial evolution consisted of individual words being added to the protomusical items that expressed some meaning, and an individual word could add some extra information relevant to the necessarily abstract meaning being expressed by the protomusic.
Over time, the word-based extension to protomusic did start to evolve grammar (for example, what happens when you add two words to a protomusical item? – it might be necessary to provide some kind of syntax that determines the relationship between the meanings of the two words in the context of the non-specific meaning of the protomusic).
At some point, the grammar evolved a sufficient level of sophistication that words could express meanings that were no longer consistent with the set of possible meanings that protomusic could express.
And when that happened, there was only one solution, which was for the protomusical component of the language to disappear.
But an odd thing happened - the protomusic didn’t actually disappear. Rather it separated from the word-based language due to a loss of function, but in the process, it acquired a new function.
Actually I believe there were at least two signicant losses of function that occurred in the evolution of music, but one of them had to happen first.
And what I propose is that the first loss of function was a disruption to the process of determining or learning the specific meanings of protomusical items.
So originally, the process was:
- Listener hears a new protomusical item, which satisfies the criterion for being a “strong” protomusical item, with an associated emotional feeling.
- Therefore the listener’s brain develops a strong feeling that this protomusical item should have some meaning consistent with the associated emotional feeling.
- By observation of how and when other individuals utter the item, the listener learns what that meaning is.
But item 3 is what got disrupted. So now the process is:
- Listener hears a new musical item, which satisfies the criterion for being a “strong” musical item, with an associated emotional feeling.
- Therefore the listener’s brain develops a strong feeling that this musical item should have some meaning consistent with the associated emotional feeling.
After the disruption, item 3 never happens, so the listener is “stuck” with the feeling that the musical item has a meaning consistent with the associated emotional feeling.
Actually, other information in the context of the musical item’s performance might provide possible meanings (such as, for example, accompanying lyrics), but, none of these meanings is ever learnt as the specific meaning of that musical item.
At this point I will mention the second loss of function, which has to do with the provocation of response, where, in the case of music, any kind of inclination to make a response or even think about what reponse to make is actively suppressed.
So now we have the musical listener:
- Listening to the musical item
- Experiencing an associated emotional feeling
- Experiencing a feeling that the music should have a meaning
- Never actually learning what that meaning actually is
- In some contexts, a possible meaning is strongly suggested separately from the actual music
- But, any inclination to response to any suggested meaning is suppressed
What, if anything, might be the function of such a phenomenon?
In effect we have:
- Experiencing a particular emotional feeling
- Considering possible meanings consistent with that emotional feeling
- Not bothering to make any effort to think about how one might have to deal with any situation described by those possible meanings
This suggests that perhaps the new function of music was as some kind of motivation to imagine emotional ideas and scenarios.
In the modern world there is no evidence that music satisfies any such function. But in the modern world our imaginings are mostly driven by existing imaginings and ideas that are derived from what other people imagine. There is very little need for anyone to learn “imagination” from scratch.
But in prehistoric times, where individuals did not have contact with very many other individuals, the ability to learn “imagination” from scratch may have been much more important, and music might have been one thing that contributed to the development of that ability.
On the subject of (proto)musical “quality”/“strength”
I have suggested that all the various features of music are relevant to the original functions of protomusic.
One thing about music is that we always prefer to listen to “good” music, and we enjoy listening to “good” music.
Someone actually has to compose the music, and it’s not such an easy thing to do – at least it requires a willingness to be interested in musical composition as something that you devote significant effort and resources to.
In a prehistoric society, with hominids living in small tribes, one would assume that “good” tunes would be passed on from adults to children.
New “good” tunes might be occasionally composed, and these would add to the tribe’s protomusical repertoire.
On the pleasure of music & protomusic
One thing we can observe about music, considered as a form of entertainment, is that it is relatively immune to boredom caused by repetition. Eventually we can tire even of our favourite tunes, if played too often. But compared to other forms of entertainment, such as stories, or jokes, music can stand a lot of repetition.
So did our ancestors enjoy protomusic in the same way that we enjoy music?
If we look to word-based language for comparison, we can observe that words per-se are not intrinsically pleasurable.
But of course we learned words when we were very young, and we no longer remember what it felt like to be a young person learning their first language. It may be that the process of learning words in your first language is pleasurable, and if it wasn’t then you wouldn’t learn that first language very well, which would be a bad thing.
I will repeat the 3 step process of learning meaning that I described above:
- Listener hears a new protomusical item, which satisfies the criterion for being a “strong” protomusical item, with an associated emotional feeling.
- Therefore the listener’s brain develops a strong feeling that this protomusical item should have some meaning consistent with the associated emotional feeling.
- By observation of how and when other individuals utter the item, the listener learns what that meaning is.
We can imagine this process of learning is pleasurable, but once step 3 is completed, the pleasure with regard to that particular protomusical item finishes.
But for music we have:
- Listener hears a new musical item, which satisfies the criterion for being a “strong” musical item, with an associated emotional feeling.
- Therefore the listener’s brain develops a strong feeling that this musical item should have some meaning consistent with the associated emotional feeling.
The process is “stuck” on step 2, so the process never completes, and therefore the pleasure never finishes.
So it follows that the hypothesis of the evolution of Protomusic into Music by functional loss can explain the surprising persistence of musical pleasure with respect to individual musical items.