Alva Noë's excellent blog post yesterday on care-taker / child intercorporeal rhythms, primary intersubjectivity, and turn-taking in conversation reminded me of research on music and biocultural evolution by two Cambridge researchers, Ian Cross and John Bispham. (I ran across their work doing research for this paper, which eventually appeared in Theory & Event 13.3 (September 2010).)
Here's what I wrote that connects most directly with Noë's post, though there's more in the linked paper on the topic (where the references are also available):
Now we must be clear that studying music in an evolutionary framework does not yield a simple adaptive story. Rather, it seems that various "proto-musical" capacities evolved separately and later were stitched together to yield human musical capacities. Bispham proposes that musical rhythmic behavior "be viewed as a constellation of concurrently operating, hierarchically organized, subskills including general timing abilities, smooth and ballistic movement (periodic and nonperiodic), the perception of pulse, a coupling of action and perception, and error correction mechanisms"; all of these "subskills share overlapping internal oscillatory mechanisms" (Bispham 2006: 125). These various capacities should be seen as "grounded in, and as having exaptively evolved from, fundamental kinesthetic abilities and modes of perceiving temporally organized events" (125). In sum, Bispham is against a straight line evolutionary story: "complex behaviors such as music evolved in a mosaic fashion, with individual components emerging or evolving independently or for independent reasons at times, and/or reforming with other components at other times" (126). This doesn't mean that any one mechanism wasn't selected for, just not the full combination as such, until much later, after independent evolution of the components. The evolutionary pressures that have shaped the fundamentally rhythmic and social aspects of our being lead Cross to claim that "infants appear to be primed for music"; in support of this, he cites important studies on rhythmic mother-infant interactions which are crucial for "primary intersubjectivity," "emotional regulation" and "emotional bonding" (Cross 2003; citing Trevarthen 1999 and Dissanayake 2000). In the same vein, Bispham classifies Dissanayake 2000 as looking for "the adaptive strength of rhythm and entrainment in the course of human evolution with reference to mother-infant interaction" (Bispham 2006: 125).
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