Abstract
The diversity of musical phenomena seems to suggest that the answer to the question, “what is music?” depends on culture. This stands in contrast to the fact that all cultures use sounds, either as the building blocks of speech or music, depending on their interpretation by the nervous system. Although musical structure is influenced by the culture-specific characteristics of music, certain properties of music such as pitch class or musical pulse are music specific phenomena. It is therefore proposed that musical essence is based on a perceptive bias that is the result of the evolution of Homo sapiens and that musical essence lies in the organization of the human brain.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adler, Guido. 1885. Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft. Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 1: 5–20.
Bispham, John C. 2010. Music’s “Design Features”: Musical Motivation, Musical Pulse, and Musical Pitch. Musicae Scientiae, Special Issue: 41–61.
Blacking, John. 1973. How Musical is Man? Seattle, London: University of Washington Press.
Bolton, Thaddeus L. 1894. Rhythm. The American Journal of Psychology 6 (2): 145–238.
Brown, Steven, and Joseph Jordania. 2013. Universals in the World’s Musics. Psychology of Music 41 (2): 229–248.
Darwin, Charles R. 1871. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray.
Deutsch, Diana, Rachael Lapidis, and Trevor Henthorn. 2008. The Speech-to-song Illusion. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 124 (4): 2471.
Deutsch, Diana, Trevor Henthorn, and Rachael Lapidis. 2011. Illusory Transformation From Speech to Song. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 129 (4): 2245–2252.
Dissanayake, Ellen. 2008. If Music is the Food of Love, What About Survival and Reproductive Success? Musicae Scientiae, Special Issue: 169–195.
Ellis, Catherine J. 1965. Pre-Instrumental scales. Ethnomusicology 9 (2): 126–137.
Fitch, W.Tecumseh. 2006. On the Biology and Evolution of Music. Music Perception 24 (1): 85–88.
Fitch, W. Tecumseh. 2015. Four Principles of Bio-Musicology. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 370(1664), 20140091. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0091. Last checked 4 July 2018.
Gourlay, Kenneth. 1984. The Non-Universality of Music and the Universality of Non-Music. The World of Music 31 (2): 25–39.
Hagen, Edward H., and Gregory A. Bryant. 2003. Music and Dance as a Coalition Signaling System. Human Nature 14 (1): 21–51.
Hagen, Edward H., and Peter Hammerstein. 2009. Did Neanderthals and Other Early Humans Sing? Seeking the Biological Roots of Music in the Loud Calls of Primates, Lions, Hyenas, and Wolves. Musicae Scientiae, Special Issue: 291–320.
von Helmholtz, Hermann L. 1863. Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik. Braunschweig: Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn.
Huovinen, Erkki. 2002. Pitch-class Constellations: Studies in the Perception of Tonal Centricity. Turku: Suomen Musiikkitieteellinen Seura.
Huron, David B. 2006. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Huron, David B. 2016. Voice Leading. The Science behind a Musical Art. Cambridge, London: MIT Press.
Jablonka, Eve, and Marion J. Lamb. 2005. Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lerdahl, Fred, and Ray Jackendoff. 1983. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Llinás, Rodolfo R. 2002. I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self. Cambridge, London: MIT Press.
London, Justin. 2012. Three Things Linguists Need to Know about Rhythm and Time in Music. Empirical Musicology Review 7 (1–2): 5–11.
McAdams, Stephen, and Bruno L. Giordano. 2008. The Perception of Musical Timbre. In The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, S. Hallam, I. Cross, and M. Thaut (eds.), 72–80. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McNeill, William H. 1995. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Merker, Bjorn. 2002. Music: The Missing Humboldt System. Musicae Scientiae 6 (3): 3–21.
Merker, Bjorn. 2003. Is There A Biology Of Music And Why Does It Matter? In Proceedings of the 5th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM), R. Kopiez (ed.), 402–405. Hanover: Institute for Research in Music Education.
Merker, Bjorn. 2006. Layered Constraints on the Multiple Creativities Of Music. In Musical Creativity. Multidisciplinary Research in Theory and Practice, I. Deliège, and G.A. Wiggins (eds.), 25–41. Hove: Psychology Press.
Miller, Geoffrey. 2000. Evolution of Human Music Through Sexual Selection. In The Origins of Music, Nils L. Wallin, Bjorn Merker, and Steven Brown (eds.), 329–360. London: MIT Press.
Nettl, Bruno. 2000. An Ethnomusicologist Contemplates Musical Universals. In The Origins of Music, Nils L. Wallin, Bjorn Merker, and Steven Brown (eds.), 463–479. London: MIT Press.
Perani, Daniela, Maria C. Saccuman, Paola Scifo, Danielo Spada, Guido Andreolli, Rosanna Rovelli, Cristina Baldoli, Stefan Koelsch, and Dale Purves. 2010. Functional Specializations for Music Processing in the Human Newborn Brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (10): 4758–4763.
Podlipniak, Piotr. 2016. The Evolutionary Origin of Pitch Centre Recognition. Psychology of Music 44 (3): 527–543.
Purves, Dale. 2017. Music as Biology. The Tones We Like and Why. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press.
Roederer, Jouan G. 1984. The Search for a Survival Value of Music. Music Perception 1 (3): 350–356.
Schellenberg, E. Glenn, and Peter Habashi. 2015. Remembering the Melody and Timbre, Forgetting the Key and Tempo. Memory & Cognition 43 (7): 1021–1031.
Serafine, Mary L. 1988. Music as Cognition: The Development of Thought in Sound. New York: Columbia University Press.
Snyder, Bob. 2001. Music and Memory: An Introduction. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Stainsby, Thomas, and Ian Cross. 2008. The Perception of Pitch. In The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, S. Hallam, I. Cross, and M. Thaut (eds.), 47–58. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Storr, Anthony. 1992. Music and the Mind. New York: The Free Press.
Tillmann, Barbara. 2005. Implicit Investigations of Tonal Knowledge in Non-musician Listeners. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1060: 100–110.
Tillmann, Barbara, Jamshed J. Bharucha, and Emmanuel Bigand. 2000. Implicit Learning of Tonality: A Self-organizing Approach. Psychological Review 107 (4): 885–913.
Tinbergen, Nico. 1963. On Aims and Methods of Ethology. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychology 20: 410–433.
Wilson, Edward O. 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage Books.
Zimmermann, Elke, Lisette Leliveld, and Simone Schehka. 2013. Toward the Evolutionary Roots of Affective Prosody in Human Acoustic Communication: A Comparative Approach to Mammalian Voices. In Evolution of Emotional Communication: From Sounds in Nonhuman Mammals to Speech and Music in Man, E. Altenmüller, S. Schmidt, and E. Zimmermann (eds.), 116–132. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Podlipniak, P. (2019). The Biological Constraints on Musical Structure as the Foundations of Musical Essence. In: Stanevičiūtė, R., Zangwill, N., Povilionienė, R. (eds) Of Essence and Context. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14471-5_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14471-5_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-14470-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-14471-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)