Some time in our prehistoric past, our ancestors produced repeated vocalisations.
The repeated vocalisations had some meaning, and they were repeated for some period of time that they were relevant.
The vocalisations were subject to emotional modulation, where the speaker’s emotional response to something caused the vocalisations to change.
For the case where a particular vocalisation in a sequence of repeated vocalisations was not emotionally modulated, we could call that the underlying default vocalisation.
Another individual listening to the speaker could deduce something about the emotional state of the speaker by observing the occurrence of the change in the repeated vocalisations occurring as a result of emotional modulation.
Listeners did not just observe a speaker’s emotional state – they lived a very collective and cooperative lifestyle, with strongly shared goals. So listeners did not just observe a speaker’s emotions – they felt the speaker’s emotions, as if it was their own emotions.
There was however a complication. If a speaker repeated a certain vocalisation, and then that vocalisation changed, there were two possible explanations:
- The speaker’s emotional state changed the underlying default vocalisation via emotional modulation, OR,
- The underlying default vocalisation had changed, as a result of the speaker’s intention to say something different.
In the second case it would be difficult for listeners to deduce anything about the speaker’s emotional state.
We can re-state this limitation in the following positive terms:
- If a listener could know with certainty that a speaker’s underlying default vocalisation had not changed,
- Then the listener could determine that any change in the vocalisation was the result of emotional modulation.
Even when a listener perceived that a given change was the result of emotional modulation, they might still not know what the precise emotional state of the speaker was, but they would at least know that the speaker was having an emotional response to something.
It follows that it would be important for listeners to have methods for determining whether or not the underlying default vocalisation in a given sequence of repeated vocalisations was changing or not.
There might have been various different methods that listeners could use to determine this. These methods could have included:
- If an emotional response is temporary, then the change caused by emotional modulation will be temporary, and therefore the vocalisations in a sequence will eventually return to their original unmodulated state.
- Even as emotional modulation changes a vocalisation in some ways, certain aspects of the vocalisations may continue unchanged.
The Hypothesis
Firstly, I propose that these repeated vocalisations, with possible emotional modulation, constituted what we call protomusic, that is, the presumed prehistoric ancestor of the thing that we call “music”.
Secondly, I propose the hypothesis that music is musical because it is a superstimulus for the perception that the underlying default vocalisation in a sequence of repeated vocalisations is not changing, and, therefore, any perceived change in those vocalisations can be attributed to emotional modulation.
That is, whatever might be the characteristics of repeated vocalisations that cause a listener to assume that the underlying default vocalisation is not changing, music contains exaggerated and extreme versions of those characteristics, and as a result, any change occurring in the repeated components of music is given an emotional interpretation.