For instance, although I don’t particularly care for atonal music, a lot of people like it. I don’t want to exclude something due to snobbery or enthocentrism or my own taste. For my purposes as a researcher, I’m willing to accept anything somebody says is music as music. There are circuits in the brain that respond differently to music than to language. In effect there’s no scientific definition, but rather it’s in the ear of the beholder. What sounds like music to one person may sound like noise to another. There’s no scientific answer and no neural answer because it’s a continuum. Music activates the reptilian brain and that suggests to me that it has some ancient evolutionary quality, but we don’t know for sure. And so we think of ourselves as a very sophisticated species, but it’s all built on this core of a reptilian brain, which is in charge of the most fundamental and basic aspects of being alive. In fact the word “cortex,” which is used to refer to the outermost layer of our brain, means “bark” in Greek. Layers were added to our core brain area, built out like the rings of a tree trunk. The brain evolved in an interesting way as reptiles became mammals and some mammals became primates and some primates became humans. For a couple of thousand years at least, it was only sung and, scholars believe, quite well preserved. It’s one reason why the Old Testament was committed to music before it was committed to writing. Music is easier to track and so its message or melody stays intact better than speech when it is shared. When talking to a young child, you don’t say, “Look at the ball” you say, “Look at the baaalllll!!!” because it’s easier for the infant to track what is going on with that exaggerated prosody. Music is exaggerated in the way infant-directed speech is exaggerated. When a signal is exaggerated it’s more robust and able to withstand passing down from generation to generation. Music is an exaggerated signal in terms of speech-exaggerated in its contours, rhythms, and timbres. One of those is the communicative nature of music. It’s not for just one reason but a host of evolutionary forces. The research seems to suggest that we’re also hard wired for music in particular.
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