programME

Sociocultural dimensions of the music education processes

What role does education have in the cultural development of music? How could informal learning be significant for the evolution of musical dialectics? How could social systems and collaborative practices influence musical expression? How could didactic innovation and educational processes be relevant for the transmission of music to the learner? These questions animated the research path of the talk. The aim is to analyze the role that education can play in highlighting the emerging characteristics of the cultural transmission of music, which occurs by stimulating globally people from a cognitive, emotional-affective and physiological dimensions. The processes of cultural transmission have made possible to define new methodologies for learning music so that the principles for the construction of emerging characteristics according to cultural dynamics are respected. Contemporary educational models highlight a student-based dimension rather than a discipline-based one. The intrinsic characteristics of music pass through a social dimension of "socio-cultural" learning. It is about putting the interactive dimension in the foreground, believing that learning develops also outside of school through informal processes of information acquisition. People learn music through a socio-cultural dimension of contact with the environment and by relating to other people. These aspects will be presented including the role of the environment and the teacher as mediators and facilitators of the learning processes. I propose an approach that considers the processes and experiences rather than placing the topics and the final products at the most important level, developing an approach based on processes rather than products.

Communicative scaffolds in the evolution of music and language: a co-evolutionary approach

Children acquire their first words through a series of gestures that are culturally required in order to interact with their material and social worlds. Face-to-face interaction plays a crucial role in this process, which also involves a sequential exchange of actions that follow specific turn-taking rules. This coincides with the way humans begin to engage with music at a very early age. Mothers and caregivers across cultures interact with infants not only through the use of melodic intonations in speech and lullabies, but also through rhythmic body movements that help to calm them down. This means that learning a language is inseparable from the acquisition of basic patterns for social interaction, which are also necessary for making music. This paper argues that studying this intricate relationship can shed important light on the construction of a common niche of capabilities that may have scaffolded the co-evolution of language and music. 

Preverbal psychology & the origins of humanity: How the fetus & infant enable the emergence of language, music, art, religion, and consciousness

Behaviors such as language, music, art, religion, and consciousness distinguish humans from other primates, but their origins are shrouded in mystery. All five may be an indirect consequence of the hyperfragility and consequent hypersociality of prehuman infants, which in turn arose from the obstetric dilemma: evolution’s failure to reconcile bipedalism with encephalization. Very roughly a million years ago, maternal mortality rates were high. Both mothers and infants were more likely to survive if birth happened earlier. Fragile infants developed new behaviors to enhance postnatal survival in interaction with caregivers. To enable that, the fetus/infant increasingly perceived the mother as sound and movement (voice, breath, heartbeat, walking) and monitored her physical and emotional state, assigning meanings to arbitrary sound patterns – a foundation of language. Protomusical/religious rituals increasingly imitated the prenatal situation by including dull light and sound, expressive pitch contours, repetition, rhythmic entrainment, implied movement, bent postures, enclosed spaces, uncanny emotions, and/or psychoactive substances. Just as the fetus/infant gradually developed an attachment relationship with the mother, ritual participants collectively perceived supernatural presence. Transcendental emotion motivated costly musical and religious participation by operant conditioning. In phylogeny, consciousness emerged with theory of mind (midwives developing empathy; infants evaluating intentions of good/bad caregivers and manipulating them with attachment behaviors) and mental time travel (caregivers moving beyond stimulus-response to predict and prevent dangerous situations for infants). In ontogeny, consciousness emerged gradually during the first few/several postnatal years in interaction with caregivers. The theory is speculative, intended as a challenging and stimulating hypothesis.

Musical expectations in human and non-human primates

The appreciation of music is a universal trait of humankind. Evidence supporting this notion includes the ubiquity of music across cultures and the natural predisposition toward music that humans display early in development. Are we musical animals because of species-specific predispositions? This question cannot be answered by relying on cross-cultural or developmental studies alone, as these cannot rule out enculturation. Instead, it calls for cross-species experiments testing whether homologous neural mechanisms un- derlying music perception are present in non- human primates. We present music to two rhesus monkeys, reared without musical exposure, while recording electroencephalography (EEG) and pupillometry. Monkeys exhibit higher engagement and neural encoding of expectations based on the previously seeded musical context when passively listening to real music as opposed to shuffled controls. We then compare human and monkey neural responses to the same stimuli and find a species-dependent contribution of two fundamental musical features—pitch and timing—in generating expectations: while timing- and pitch-based expectations are similarly weighted in humans, monkeys rely on timing rather than pitch. Together, these results shed light on the phylogeny of music perception. They highlight monkeys’ capacity for processing temporal structures beyond plain acoustic processing, and they identify a species-dependent contribution of time- and pitch-related features to the neural encoding of musical expectations.

Biology and culture in the evolution of human rhythm

Who’s got rhythm? And why are we such musical, chatty animals? Human music and speech are peculiar behaviors from an evolutionary biology perspective, but they both feature rhythm among their building blocks. Many hypotheses try to explain the origins of acoustic rhythm capacities, but few are empirically tested and compared. Because music and speech do not fossilize, and lacking a time machine, the comparative approach provides a powerful tool to tap into human cognitive history. Notably, behaviors that are homologous or analogous to human rhythm can be found across a few animal species and developmental stages. Hence, investigating rhythm across species is not only interesting to zoology, but it is key to unveil when music-like and speech-like behaviors appeared in human evolution. 

In this talk, I will introduce the major hypotheses for the evolution of vocal rhythmicity in humans and other animals, which link acoustic rhythms to vocal learning, gait, breathing, or group chorusing. I will suggest how integrating approaches from ethology, psychology, neuroscience, modeling, and physiology is needed to obtain a full picture. I will then zoom in on some crucial species which are key to test alternative hypotheses on rhythm origins. I will present rhythm data from marine mammals and primates, suggesting that rhythm research in non-human animals can also benefit from ecologically-relevant setups, combining strengths and knowledge from human cognitive neuroscience and behavioral ecology. Finally, I will present human experiments where musical rhythm is created and evolves culturally due to cognitive and motoric biases. 

Both behavioural and neural data show the importance of an interplay between biology and culture. These results suggest that, while the full package may be uniquely human, many mammals share one or more building blocks of human rhythmicity. These biological biases may be aplified by cultural transmission to result in human musical rhythm as we know it. 

Why Birds Can’t Sing: Lessons for evolutionary musicology from the philosophy of language

Since ancient times, philosophers have defined humans as the zoon logon echon, the ‘animal with language’ or the ‘rational animal.’ While not denying that other animals communicate and signal to one another in incredibly intricate and detailed ways, this conception suggests that there is something about human language that makes it different in kind to the myriad forms of animal communication.

Many thinkers (Heidegger 1995; Collins 2009; Taylor 2016) trace this difference to an ‘interpretative gap’ between the speaker and hearer, and the ambiguity of meaning that results from abstract concepts; that is, concepts that are not directly connected to an object or action. Animal signals, by contrast, tend to lack such ambiguity. In Millikan’s (1993; cf. Tomasello 2008) terms, their ‘indicative’ function (that, for example, a predator is nearby) is interconnected with its ‘imperative’ function (a call to an action, such as to flee).

Music-like behaviour, such as melodic calls or rhythmic drumming, is common in the animal kingdom, most notably among birds. Yet such behaviour, I will argue, likewise combines both indicative and imperative functions, as when a birdsong serves as a territorial signal or a mating call.

Humans, of course, also use music to do things – to co-ordinate actions, regulate emotions, or build a sense of group identity. But I will argue that – as with our use of abstract language – we also engage in musical practices whose function, if any, is ambiguous, and as an expression of what Taylor (2016) calls ‘human meanings’ that cannot be reduced to biological functions.

The parallels between human language and musicality have formed a fertile starting point for research into the evolution of both. I therefore conclude with some questions and suggestions about how the distinction of human language from animal communication might shed light on the evolution of musicality – and vice versa.

Predictive dynamics of music and language evolution, explored through vocal interaction

In recent years, the life sciences have been characterised by attempts to bridge the domains of evolution, cognition and animal communication. Rooted in information theory and thermodynamics, frameworks such as active inference (e.g. Parr, Pezzulo & Friston, 2022) and biosemiotics (e.g. Deacon 1997, 2012; Tomlinson 2015) have been applied to formalise and explicate phenomena such as niche construction, and communication among organisms and computational agents. In a complementary vein, some evolutionary theorists have emphasised the fundamentality of a system’s dynamic behaviour for its evolution, cogently described by phase portraits and other formalisms in dynamical systems theory. These conceptual and methodological bridges could bear great potential to in turn explicate the evolution of language and music, and possibly animal communication systems in general. Using active inference, biosemiotics, and evolutionary theorising as interpretative frameworks, we propose a differentiation - into song and speech - of the communication between human agents, based on differential predictive dynamics in social interaction. These dynamics kick off a cycle of constraints and new affordances provided by emerging sets of vocal elements, thereby reducing uncertainty about the agent-environment system. These sets in turn indicate a differentiation of vocalisations into relatively autonomous cultural kinds (Wagner & Tomlinson 2022), which can be culturally transmitted. Resulting vocal elements thus are indexical traces of their origin in social interaction. Moment-to-moment dynamics of vocalised interaction could therefore be indicative of long-term evolutionary transitions. We will describe a research agenda (with pilot results) where we plan to measure this by combining information-theoretic computational models with phase-space analyses.

Anatomizing Musicality: Song, Drumming, Dance as Key Comparative Peepholes

A fruitful comparative approach to understanding the evolution of human musicality requires that we break down the complex trait of musicality into relevant components that have at least some shared features with those of other species. Three promising candidates for this dissection are song (particularly learned song performed by groups), drumming (probably the ur-instrument, and an ability clearly shared with other apes) and dance (a capacity to move to a musical beat). I argue that comparative evidence concerning each of these components provides a useful perspective on how, when and why human musicality, in its modern form, evolved.