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The musical impulse
by Ellen Dissanayake
Music’s origins are hidden in human prehistory. To
explain our penchant for music, scientists of the
Darwinian stripe have offered several theories,
some pointing to competition for mates and
others to tribal bonding.
The author of this essay argues that certain
well-known twists in our evolutionary path
might have led to our deep-seated inclination—
and absolute need—to make music together.
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esponsiveness to music—musicality
—is close to universal in human
beings. The question therefore naturally arises as to whether musicality
is a capacity that is somehow related to our
survival as a species. Some thinkers, such
as the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker,
dismiss that possibility. Pinker considers
the arts to be superfluous byproducts of
other evolutionary adaptations. He makes
an analogy between our craving for the
arts and our craving for strawberry cheesecake. Our craving for the cheesecake is a
by-product, he argues, of our craving for
fats and sweets, a deep-seated impulse that
evolved during the Ice Age. Back then,
when foods with sugar and fat were hard
to come by, it was advantageous for
humans to gorge on the high-calorie, energy-rich foodstuffs (fruits and meats) whenever they encountered them, rather than to
be satisfied with tubers or leaves. Pinker
argues that music—like sugar, fat, alcohol,
recreational drugs, and pornography—satisfies cravings that in other contexts help
or helped us to survive and perpetuate ourselves. Even though these concentrated
doses of sensory and mental delight are
nonfunctional, we like them because they
“[press] our pleasure buttons.”
Pinker’s analogy is clever and amusing.
Sometimes music, like eating, is an indulgence. However, any suggestion that the
arts exist simply for pressing pleasure buttons disappears when one considers the
many uses of the arts in today’s remaining
hunter-gatherer societies—or when one
thinks about prehistoric art, such as the
beautiful cave paintings of our Stone Age
R
ancestors in what is now France and Spain. Laments, funerary
arts, crawling through a kilometer of narrow, wet, dark tunnels to
paint (or view and perform ceremonies before) images of bison
and other animals on cave walls—these are not things people do
for entertainment and fun. The sheer amount of time, energy,
and material resources invested in ceremonial behavior—in
which music, dance, visual décor, and literary language all combine
—indicates that pleasure is not the only, or even greatest, reason
for the centrality and persistence of these arts in the overwhelming number of human societies for which we have historical (and
sometimes pre-historical) evidence. Music induces emotional
states—fellow-feeling, affirmation, solemnity, tears, intimations
of transcendence—that can’t be reduced to self-gratification.
I believe that proto-musical capacities did help us to survive as
a species, and that these abilities may well have emerged as an
indirect consequence of our walking upright on two legs and
gradually developing an enlarged brain. These two trends, paleontologists tell us, were well underway by 1.6 million years ago.
One of the related anatomical changes traceable in our ancestors
after this time was a gradually narrowing pelvis. This made us
more fit for upright walking, with legs positioned directly under
the torso. But the change in pelvic contours made for difficulties
at birth for mothers and their increasingly big-headed infants.
How did the human species get beyond this impasse?
Paleontologists agree that the evolutionary solution (or compromise) was that natural selection favored infants being born in an
increasingly premature state. Smaller babies at the time of birth
meant that more mothers, and therefore more babies, survived.
But it also meant that these infants were less developed and
required more care. Over evolutionary time, human babies gradually became what they are today—much more helpless at birth
than the infants of any other primate species.
Survival of our human ancestors must have therefore required
strong and long-lasting bonds between mother and infant. At
birth and with lactation, the release of hormones such as oxytocin
ensures that all mammalian mothers, including humans, feel
attached to their infants in the short run. But what ensured that
early and pre-human mothers would willingly devote constant
attention and care to helpless, demanding offspring for years? To
this, I propose an answer that ultimately is connected with the
origins of music.
Interestingly, shortly after birth (and at least as early as four
weeks), mothers and infants universally engage in mutual interactions that coordinate their behavior and emotions. Child
psychologist/biologists Colwyn Trevarthen (of the University of
Edinburgh) and Stephen Malloch (of the University of Western
Sydney) call this behavior “communicative musicality.” This
mother-infant interaction is far more than the lilting, simplified
utterances of “motherese,” “infant-directed speech,” or “baby
talk.” It also includes concurrent special facial expressions and
movements of the head and body. They are organized in bouts
(“phrases”) over time and in time, and have such musical features
as melodic vocal contours, rhythmic and regularized vocalizations
and body movement, and expressive dynamic contrasts and variations in space (large-small, up-down) and time (fast-slow, shortlong), with behavioral “rests” or silences between bouts. The
interactions are a “performance” of the mother, during which
simultaneous vocal, facial, and bodily movements are organized on
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a common pulse. A surreptitious perusal of parents with infants in any airport waiting area will
reveal this ordinary and unselfconscious display.
Anthropologists have filmed the same kind of
mutual gaze, exaggerated facial expressions
and movements and sounds in mothers and
fathers with infants in cultures around the globe.
Note that these “packages” of visual, vocal,
and bodily expression are simplified, repeated,
exaggerated—just what one might assume is
necessary for attracting and holding the attention
of an immature baby. These signals possibly
derived from expressions that adults use with
each other in normal positive social interchange—open mouth, eyebrow flash (that
quick acknowledgment or greeting we give to
sented in future generations. Thus, over evolutionary time, a
behavior or trait that is advantageous to survival is likely to be
perpetuated genetically. Those with that trait are more “fit,” in the
Darwinian sense.)
Communicating musically—through simplification, repetition,
exaggeration, elaboration (and, for older infants, by manipulating
expectation, or “surprise,” as in the “peek-a-boo” game)—
undoubtedly developed long ago in ancestral mothers and
infants. Long before adults intentionally began to make what we
now call music (or any art forms that in small-scale societies are
generally performed all together in rituals), these proto-musical
operations served to coordinate behavior and emotion of caretaker
and infant, and by so doing, “bonded” the pair. In this scenario,
the capacities for eventual music originate not in sexual display
(as the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller has proposed in
his book The Mating Mind ), but in love or mutuality—behav-
Although these are still photographs, some taken from anthropologists’ videos, one can imagine the adults and
infants moving their heads and making vocal sounds along with the facial expressions—in essentially a multimedia duet. Left to right: A Yanomamö father and infant, in the Upper Orinoco region of Brazil, show the mutual
a friend who unexpectedly enters our attention), smile, looking at, head bob backward,
body leaning toward, head nodding, soft,
high-pitched undulant vocalizations, touches,
pats, and kisses—many of which, incidentally,
are present, in some form, in social bonding
and submission among other primates, such as
chimpanzees, orangutans, and even some
monkeys.
Rather than adults’ unilaterally “teaching”
babies to like these signals, babies encourage us
to interact with them in a way that we would
never think of using with other adults or even
older children. It seems reasonable to assume
that these common communicative signals
that reinforce social relationships would have
also reinforced—through feedback—neural
circuits in the mother’s own brain as she was
communicating her feelings of love and
attachment to her infant. Such reinforcement
would have enhanced infant survival and, by
extension, the mother’s reproductive success
—what biologists would call her “evolutionary
fitness.” (Simply put, those who cannot raise
their young to independence are not repre34
june 2006
ioral and emotional coordination between two individuals who
need each other for their own reasons. For the baby, it is survival;
for the mother, reproductive success.
But how might our ancestors have distilled music from protomusic? An answer arises from observing music in traditional
foraging (hunting and gathering) societies—the only form of
human society until six to eight thousand years ago. In these and
more contemporary small-scale social groups, music—ritual
singing, chanting, intoning, playing an instrument, dancing,
keeping time by striking or moving to a beat—and the other arts
are an integral part of ceremonies. Early ethnographers of the arts
(such as the American anthropologist Franz Boas and countless
others) noted the close relationship in small-scale societies
between music, poetic language, and expressive movement.
How did these rituals help us? What good were they? Part of
the answer may lie with the psychological consequences of our
developing greater intelligence. With larger brains, ancestral
humans had better memories (of significant events, both desired
and feared) and foresight (the ability to predict and plan). Such
expanded awareness provides the ground and motivation for what
we call religion—in brief, the concern about why good and bad
things happen, how they got that way, and what can be done to
promote or prevent them. One could say, in fact, that ceremonies
involving music and associated arts are the behavioral counterpart
of religious belief. Rather than simply responding instinctively
and contingently to uncertainty, as many animals
do, early humans at some point would wish to do
something about hunger, danger, illness, and other
important survival-related states. Ritual arts provide
“something ‘special’—something shaped, or embellished”—for humans attempting to cope with the
problems and uncertainties of mortal existence.
Ceremonies—ritualized arts based on the operations
of communicative musicality—conjoin individuals,
providing emotional reassurance that the group’s
efforts will prevail.
The elaborate messages of ceremonies are meant
to attract spirits, ancestors, and other forces that
affect human lives. Hoped-for outcomes are success
in hunting, protection in warfare, prosperity, fertility, traversing important life stages, healing. By join-
with anxiety antedates and resembles Harvard evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson’s suggestion that general intelligence, which
leads to behavioral flexibility, has the downside of producing
confusion and uncertainty. For Wilson, the arts are designed “to
create order and meaning from the chaos of daily existence [and
to] nourish our craving for the mystical.”
The human tendency to come together is especially great under
stressful circumstances. The pioneering anthropologists
Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead both described small
groups (in what is now Papua New Guinea) huddling together
and chanting charms in a singsong voice to abate the violence of
a storm. Having “something to do” in a time of stress, such as
moving and vocalizing rhythmically with others, would be more
soothing—and safer—than going one’s own way. If the storm
abated without mishap, one can imagine the chanting becoming
more formalized and elaborated during subsequent storms.
Another plausible model for
an origin of early human
music is the lament, a widespread performance by individuals or groups in which the
natural behavior of weeping
and moaning in grief at the
loss of a loved one became
formalized in song/poetry/
movement and shared with
others to relieve feelings of
helplessness, individual isolation, despair, and anxiety.
Even the spontaneous reacgaze and raised eyebrows. An !ko San woman and baby, in Southern Africa show the playful grimace with raised
tions of individuals in the
eyebrows. An Eipo (Irian Jaya) woman and baby show mock surprise with raised eyebrows. In East Sepik (Papua
United States after the SeptNew Guinea), a grandfather and infant granddaughter, show raised eyebrows and exaggerated smile.
ember 2001 attacks illustrate
ing with others in music- and art-filled rituals, indithe therapeutic nature of participation in temporally organized
viduals may then—as now—have felt more compeand elaborated behavior—listening with others to song, liturgy,
tent to deal with life’s uncertainties and accompaand poetry, walking solemnly and formally in a procession while
nying physical stresses. As we now know, hormones
holding candles, flowers, and flags, or composing poetry to be
released during prolonged stress are debilitating to
placed with quiet ceremony in public places.
a wide range of bodily functions, including immune
The phenomenon of human music is ancient. With roots in
system activity, mental performance, growth and tiscommunicative musicality, it fosters emotional communion,
sue repair, and reproductive physiology and behavior.
which in turn has a variety of biological, social, and cultural manOur ancestors who participated in group rituals
ifestations and purposes. Some of them—such as going to public
were doubtless less stressed than those who, in conconcerts and sitting among an audience of strangers, or listening
trast, went their own isolate, anxious ways.
to or making music alone—are far from, and even different from,
A large literature exists on music being used by
their source. But the view of human music as being rooted in
individuals in modern societies to “regulate,
communicative musicality helps us to appreciate music’s emoenhance, and change qualities and levels of emotional and transformative power in human experience and to
tion.” To soothe themselves, both infants and adults
understand its antiquity and unique importance to our species.
engage in repetitive physical and vocal behaviors; at
its most pathological, this behavior can end up as
rocking and head-banging. Even captive animals that
perform pathological-appearing repetitive behaviors
are found to have lower signs of stress than their
Ellen Dissanayake is an independent scholar, writer, and lecturer
counterparts who do not move stereotypically and
who lives and plays chamber music in Seattle. Her most recent book
repeatedly. Mothers use the proto-musical operais Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (University of Washington
tions of communicative musicality to soothe and
Press, 2000). This essay is excerpted and adapted from a chapter in
regularize emotional states in their infants.
Communicative Musicality, edited by Stephen Malloch & Colwyn
My suggestion that the arts help individuals cope
Trevarthen, to be published in spring 2007 by Oxford University Press.
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