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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2020
Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archeology, anthropology, biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience into a unified framework that accounts for the biological and cultural evolution of music. We argue that the evolution of musicality involves gene–culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors that initially arose and spread as cultural inventions had feedback effects on biological evolution because of their impact on social bonding. We emphasize the deep links between production, perception, prediction, and social reward arising from repetition, synchronization, and harmonization of rhythms and pitches, and summarize empirical evidence for these links at the levels of brain networks, physiological mechanisms, and behaviors across cultures and across species. Finally, we address potential criticisms and make testable predictions for future research, including neurobiological bases of musicality and relationships between human music, language, animal song, and other domains. The music and social bonding hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music.
We are delighted to present an unusual BBS publication. In early 2018, we received a double submission: two papers exploring the same topic from different perspectives – “Origins of Music in Credible Signaling,” by Samuel A. Mehr, Max M. Krasnow, Gregory A. Bryant, and Edward H. Hagen; and “Music as a Co-evolved System for Social Bonding,” by Patrick E. Savage, Psyche Loui, Bronwyn Tarr, Adena Schachner, Luke Glowacki, Steven Mithen, and W. Tecumseh Fitch. Each paper was reviewed in parallel, but independently, and both ultimately accepted. Our intention was to encourage consideration of how complex subjects like music might be investigated in different ways, integrating the perspectives of different laboratories and multiple commentators.
Thus, invited commentators might respond to the Mehr et al. article, the Savage et al. article, or both. Most chose both, as hoped. Unlike the usual BBS article presentation, the two target articles, two commentary groups and responses are interleaved. Follow the links above to find the companion target article and for the index of commentaries and responses. – The Editors
Target article
Music as a coevolved system for social bonding
Related commentaries (24)
A boldly comparative approach will strengthen co-evolutionary accounts of musicality's origins
A neurodevelopmental disorders perspective into music, social attention, and social bonding
Beyond “consistent with” adaptation: Is there a robust test for music adaptation?
Clarifying the link between music and social bonding by measuring prosociality in context
Ecological and psychological factors in the cultural evolution of music
Evolutionary linguistics can help refine (and test) hypotheses about how music might have evolved
Human evolution of gestural messaging and its critical role in the human development of music
If it quacks like a duck: The by-product account of music still stands
Is neural entrainment to rhythms the basis of social bonding through music?
Is the MSB hypothesis (music as a coevolved system for social bonding) testable in the Popperian sense?
Isochrony, vocal learning, and the acquisition of rhythm and melody
Music and dance are two parallel routes for creating social cohesion
Music as a social bond in patients with amnesia
Music as a trait in evolutionary theory: A musicological perspective
Not by signalling alone: Music's mosaicism undermines the search for a proper function
Oxytocin as an allostatic agent in the social bonding effects of music
Pre-hunt charade as the cradle of human musicality
Progress without exclusion in the search for an evolutionary basis of music
Rapid dissonant grunting, or, but why does music sound the way it does?
Sex and drugs and rock and roll
Social bonding and music: Evidence from lesions to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex
The evolution of music as artistic cultural innovation expressing intuitive thought symbolically
Where they sing solo: Accounting for cross-cultural variation in collective music-making in theories of music evolution
Why don't cockatoos have war songs?
Author response
Toward a productive evolutionary understanding of music
Toward inclusive theories of the evolution of musicality