Things that only exist because Music and/or Proto-Music came first

Music: Who ordered that?

When physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi heard about the discovery of the muon, he famously said “Who ordered that?”.

Biologists could ask the same question about music.

Music is this thing that exists, but there is no obvious reason for its existence.

Music does not serve any obvious biological function, other than that of enjoyment.

And enjoyment does not actually count as a “function”. Enjoyment is a strong indication that something has a function, but it cannot itself be the function.

Music has some kind of relationship with spoken language. A lot of music includes words in the music, ie lyrics in songs. But at the same time, we can leave the words out entirely and replace the singing with an instrument playing the melody, and it’s still recognisable as music. So the words are not an essential part of the music.

And when we try to go in the other direction, ie starting with spoken language and considering if it’s possible to somehow add music, we find that spoken language does not include music, not even as an optional extra.

There is some kind of relationship between music and spoken language, but it is hard to pin down exactly what that relationship is.

Spoken language is the main thing that makes us human.

Without spoken language, we wouldn’t even be able to ask questions like “Why does music exist?”, or “Why do muons exist?”.

Music, on the other hand, seems like something unessential.

But, maybe, in the past, music played some essential role in the evolution of spoken language.

Maybe music was itself some kind of language, expressing some kind of meaning in the melody and rhythm.

Or, allowing that everything evolves over time, maybe music evolved from something else, an ancestor that we could call proto-music. (“Proto-music” is a word referring to some hypothetical ancestor of music, so I will use that term here.)

And maybe proto-music was the thing that played an essential role in the evolution of spoken language.

Maybe proto-music was some kind of language, expressing meaning in the melody and the rhythm (which of course wouldn’t be musical melodies and rhythms, because actually they were proto-musical melodies and rhythms - similar somehow, but at the same time different).

In other words, language as we know it, with words and sentences, could only come into existence because proto-music existed first. And then proto-music later evolved into music, which is why music exists.

We might speculate further that music itself, in something close to its current form, played an essential role in the further evolution and development of modern human culture, without which we would not be asking questions like “Why does music exist?” (or “Why do muons exist?").

If proto-music and music did indeed play these roles in the evolution and development of spoken language and human culture and thinking, then we would be able to give a definitive answer to the question “Why does music exist?”.

The answer would be: “Music exists, because if music and its ancestral form of proto-music didn’t exist, spoken language would not have come into existence, and human culture would not have developed to the point where we would be asking questions like ‘Why does music exist?’”.

So, did proto-music and music play an essential role in the evolution of spoken language and the development of human thought and culture?

As it happens, I have developed a theory which implies exactly that.

The Super-Stimulus Hypothesis

I have developed a theory that music is a super-stimulus for the perception of psychological distance in proto-music, where proto-music was a form of emotional language that preceded the evolution of modern human word-based language, as explained in my earlier article Music is a Super-Stimulus for the Perception of Psychological Distance in Proto-Music.

Based on this theory, I can present a list of things that only exist now because music or proto-music came first.

Things that only exist because Proto-Music came first

Spoken Word-Based Language

According to my theory, words initially evolved as an enhancement to proto-music.

That is, proto-music was a thing that already existed as a system of communication, and words evolved initially as an additional enhancement of that system of communication. Words did not evolve from scratch. There was never a time when one of our ancestors just decided to speak a single word, for some reason.

There was a time when one of our ancestors used proto-music as a form of communication, and, for some reason, they altered some part of a proto-musical utterance in such a manner that some part of that utterance took a form that we would recognise as being a word. (This alteration might have been nothing more than the modulation of a single syllable to have a vowel sound somewhat distinct from the default vowel sound occurring in the proto-music - see the section on vowels and consonants below for more detail.)

Proto-music was a form of emotional communication that expressed or asserted shared emotion in relation to a referent, where the referent was something of immediate concern to both speaker and listener (or listeners).

In its earliest form, proto-music did not include any information as to what the asserted emotion was about, and it didn’t need to, because it was always obvious to both speaker and listeners what any particular proto-musical utterance was about.

However, proto-music evolved an enhanced ability to allow the speaker to specify a referent that was not completely obvious to those listening, by means of the addition of words.

That is, in a situation where the referent of a proto-musical utterance was not completely obvious, and might have been one of several different things, words provided additional information to specify which of the different possible referents was the actual referent.

This hypothesis about the evolution of words as a component of human language is somewhat different from many other hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the evolution of language. Those other hypotheses generally start with the assumption that word-based language had to express full meanings by itself from the get-go. And those hypotheses have problems like “How could individual words be useful?”, and “Did vocabulary and syntax evolve simultaneously?”, and “Why would a speaker start saying words if no one else yet knew what the words meant?”.

In contrast, my hypothesis assumes that our ancestors were already communicating something without the use of words, and words then evolved as an incremental enhancement to this existing form of communication.

Vowels and Consonants

In modern spoken languages, the bulk of information is encoded and transmitted in the form of the choice of vowel and consonant sounds that make up the words.

With music, if we consider music without the inclusion of words, the “information” is communicated primarily by melody and rhythm.

Choice of vowels and consonants is to a major degree orthogonal to choice of melody and rhythm.

We can imagine evolution as being an agent that has to decide how it can enhance proto-music to add additional information. The proto-music conveys information by means of melody and rhythm. The proto-musical singing includes consonant-like sounds to define the rhythm, and vowel-like sounds to define the melody. But there is no information conveyed in a choice of possible consonant sounds or possible vowel sounds.

So we can imagine evolution thinking to itself, and saying, I need some way to introduce additional choices from a set of possibilities to convey additional information, and I need to do it in a way that doesn’t interfere with the existing system of melody and rhythm, so what can I do? And evolution happened on the idea of having a set of different possible consonant sounds and a set of different possible vowel sounds, and then using the choices of consonants and vowels to convey additional information, as a layer above the existing melody and rhythm.

From a modern songwriter’s point of view, what this means is that, given a tune with a particular melody and rhythm, you are free to choose whatever words you want for the lyrics.

Actually, this is not quite true. For example, in a language like English, individual words have intrinsic accents, and the accents of the words in the lyrics have to be consistent with the rhythm of the tune.

And in tonal languages, the words have tonal components, so those have to be consistent with the melody.

However, if we assume that words initially evolved as an enhancement to an existing proto-musical language based only on melody and rhythm, then we might reasonably suppose that all the additional information content of those words was contained in a form that did not conflict with or otherwise constrain the rhythm and melody of the proto-music. That is, the very first words consisted only of vowels and consonants, without any intrinsic accents, and without any tonal components.

(The implication is that spoken languages could only acquire aspects of intrinsic rhythm and melody in the words after proto-musical melody and rhythm ceased to be part of normal communication. And the artistic problem of matching words in song lyrics to the melody and rhythm of the music was something that came only after that.)

Of course it is quite possible that the first words were very, very simple in their initial form. For example the very first words might have been only one syllable each. And they might not have contained both vowels and consonants - they might only have consisted of vowel sounds. And there might only have been 2 or maybe 3 distinct vowel sounds. So the very first word-based language might have contained only 3 distinct words, ie “a”, “i” and “u”. (And you could ask what those three words actually meant, and that is a good question, but possibly there is no easy way for us to ever know the answer to that question.)

Over time word-based language evolved to become more sophisticated, with more words, and longer words, and then syntax to make sentences. Word-based language evolved to the extent it became much more powerful than the original proto-musical language that enabled word-based language to evolve in the first place.

Proto-music made it possible for word-based language to evolve, but eventually, proto-music itself became a barrier to the further evolution and development of word-based language.

To be fully free, the words had to “leave” the music behind (or more precisely, they had to leave the proto-music behind).

There may have been multiple reasons why proto-music was a barrier to the evolution of word-based language, but two major reasons would have been:

• Proto-music was limited in the meanings it could express, in particular, it could only express shared emotion about something. Word-based language could be used to talk about things with or without emotional content, and when there was emotional content, the emotion did not necessarily have to be shared emotion.

• Proto-music had a structure that was limiting - it had a single context that remained essentially constant for the duration of the utterance, and the proto-musical utterance probably had to be repeated indefinitely. When a new proto-musical utterance had to be started, this required a full reset of the associated context (think of transitions between songs played on the radio, without any tricky modulation or fancy DJ-style transition from one song to the next). Whereas, with word-based language, it's enough to say something once, and also the context of speech or conversation is constantly updated as one individual or another says something.

As a result of these limitations, the proto-musical component of the language ceased to be a useful component of the communication system used by our ancestors, and so the melodic and rhythmic components of the proto-music disappeared, and once that happened, the word-based language was free to acquire its own components of melody or rhythm (or both).

Things that only exist because Music came first

According to my hypothesis, proto-music was eventually completely replaced by word-based language.

But, proto-music “pivoted” to a new function, as music. The defining characteristic of music was that music was a super-stimulus for the perception of psychological distance in proto-music.

Music was not a form of pragmatic communication like proto-music or spoken language. Rather it created motivation for listeners to maximise psychological distance in their thoughts, that is, to think about things as far removed as possible from the here-and-now.

Music wasn’t a form of communication - rather it was a mind alterant.

In the modern human world, there are two things that are very strongly associated with music:

• Fictional movie or TV content

• Religion

(A cynic would say that the second item is really just a special case of the first item, but I won’t get into that discussion here.)

In both cases we can identify a separation from the current here-and-now:

• Fiction describes scenarios that have been invented by someone, and are therefore necessarily distinct from the audience’s here-and-how.

• Religion describes alleged elements of reality that are in some way far removed from the ordinary everyday experience of the believer.

Given that music plays a significant role in the motivations of those who experience fiction or religion, we can take this observation one step further, and hypothesize that these two things only exist because music came first, and it was music that motivated their development. That is:

• Music motivated some members of the audience to create fictional scenarios in their minds, and when they decided to describe those scenarios to other listeners, the music motivated those other listeners to experience the emotions of those scenarios. (In practice the initial re-telling of fictional scenarios might have been after the music finished, but all those involved would eventually realise that the whole thing worked better when the re-telling of stories was integrated with the experience of the music.)

• Music motivated some members of the audience to think “spiritually” about the possibility of things and beings existing beyond ordinary mundane reality. When they described those ideas to other music listeners, the music motivated those other listeners to also experience the emotions invoked by those religious thoughts and ideas. And thus was born religion. (An interesting book that touches on the relationship between music and religion is Music and Transcendence edited by Ferdia J. Stone-Davis.)

But do fiction and religion have a biological function?

I have asserted that music was responsible for the development of both fiction and religion.

But do either of these things have an actual biological function?

Fiction, by definition, is about things that are not true.

And one can take the view that the content of most if not all major religions has been made up by someone and probably isn’t true.

Thinking about a god who is some kind of super-person who sometimes talks to real people and sometimes performs miracles is not a practically useful thing to do, because no such super-person actually exists.

In the modern world, we can become familiar with a very large part of “reality”, especially with the development of modern science. We know a lot about times long ago and places far away. There is no significant unexplored portion of the world’s land surface.

In this modern world, if you are inclined to think about something outside of the reality that you know about, it’s quite likely that the thing you are thinking of is not real at all.

But in much earlier times, most people’s personal “reality” was much more limited.

There was a greater chance that if you thought about something outside your normal reality, then that thing could be something that was actually real, or which perhaps could be made to come into existence.

This I think was the true value of music - it encouraged our human ancestors to expand their horizons within the confines of their own minds, to think about things beyond their normal everyday reality, and in some cases to take action as a result, be it to explore new worlds, or to find new ways of doing things or different ways to interact with other people socially, or perhaps to construct some object or building different from what had ever been built before.

And because music motivated our ancestors to expand their horizons in this manner, it played a major role in making human culture and thought what they are today.