Abstract
Commentary: The Evolution of Musicality: What Can Be Learned from Language Evolution Research?
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience, a section of the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience
The most appropriate biological framework to investigate language and music evolution, as already suggested by several authors (e.g., Asano and Boeckx, 2015; Fitch, 2018), is provided by Tinbergen’s four questions (Tinbergen, 1963): Mechanisms/causality: How does the steady state of the mind/brain, i.e., its functional architecture and its processing mechanisms (Shallice and Cooper, 2011), look like? Ontogeny: How does a system in interaction with its environment develop from its initial state to its steady state? Phylogeny: How did that species-specific initial state evolve? Function: Why did it evolve? Importantly, Tinbergen’s term “mechanism” refers to internal causal processes or causes underlying behaviors
This indicates that music evolution research must take internal components of the functional architecture of the neurocognitive system seriously instead of observing or experimenting with external musics in terms of animal signals and behaviors (e.g., Honing, 2018)
Summary
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience, a section of the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. Music evolution research requires an integrated approach combining experimental research and formal-mathematical modeling, especially computer simulation of cognitive and neural processes (Anderson, 2014).
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