Evolutionary musicology

Evolutionary musicology is a subfield of biomusicology that grounds the cognitive mechanisms of music appreciation and music creation in evolutionary theory. It covers vocal communication in other animals, theories of the evolution of human music, and holocultural universals in musical ability and processing. The origins of the field can be traced back to Charles Darwin who wrote in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex: When we treat of sexual selection we shall see that primeval man, or rather some early progenitor of man, probably first used his voice in producing true musical cadences, that is in singing, as do some of the gibbon-apes at the present day; and we may conclude from a widely-spread analogy, that this power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexes,—would have expressed various emotions, such as love, jealousy, triumph,—and would have served as a challenge to rivals. It is, therefore, probable that the imitation of musical cries by articulate sounds may have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions. This theory of a musical protolanguage has been revived and re-discovered repeatedly. Prehistoric musicMusic archaeology and Cognitive neuroscience of music Like the origin of language, the origin of music has been a topic for speculation and debate for centuries. Leading theories include Darwin's theory of partner choice (women choose male partners based on musical displays), the idea that human musical behaviors are primarily based on behaviors of other animals (see zoomusicology), the idea that music emerged because it promotes social cohesion, the idea that music emerged because it helps children acquire verbal, social, and motor skills, and the idea that musical sound and movement patterns, and links between music, religion and spirituality, originated in prenatal psychology and mother-infant attachment. Two major topics for any subfield of evolutionary psychology are the adaptive function (if any) and phylogenetic history of the mechanism or behavior of interest including when music arose in human ancestry and from what ancestral traits it developed.