Musicality: Instinct or Acquired Skill? - Gary F. Marcus
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Topics in Cognitive Science (2012) 1–15
Copyright 2012 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN: 1756-8757 print / 1756-8765 online
DOI: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01220.x
Musicality: Instinct or Acquired Skill?
Gary F. Marcus
Department of Psychology, New York University
Received 2 February 2011; received in revised form 8 June 2012; accepted 18 July 2012
Abstract
Is the human tendency toward musicality better thought of as the product of a specific, evolved
instinct or an acquired skill? Developmental and evolutionary arguments are considered, along with
issues of domain-specificity. The article also considers the question of why humans might be consis-
tently and intensely drawn to music if musicality is not in fact the product of a specifically evolved
instinct.
Keywords: Music; Musicality; Evolution; Cognitive development; Innateness; Instinct; Skill learning
1. What is in a phrase?
In recent years, the phrase ‘‘music instinct’’ has become exceptionally common currency,
used as the title of a television documentary (Mannes, 2009), a popular book on music (Ball,
2010), and an academic journal article (Mithen, 2009). What would it mean for human
beings to possess a music instinct? And how could we tell?
There are a variety of meanings that ‘‘music instinct’’ might hold, both weak and strong.
The weakest possible meaning that we might assign to the phrase music instinct would be
one in which all the force is on the word instinct rather than music, in which human beings
would be endowed with a general-purpose instinct that allows them to acquire culture, with
music being just one among many different manifestations of acquirable culture. On the
other hand, one might take the phrase music instinct in more forceful fashion, with equal
weight on the words music and instinct, such that human beings were putatively endowed
innately with a capacity to understand music, a desire to listen to it, and perhaps even
an inborn ability to create it. On this latter view, music is not just one arbitrary instantiation
of a general capacity for acquiring culture but rather a specific basket of innately wired
mechanisms.
Correspondence should be sent to Gary Marcus, Department of Psychology, New York University, NY
10003. E-mail: gary.marcus@nyu.edu2 G. F. Marcus ⁄ Topics in Cognitive Science (2012) The point of this article is to evaluate the plausibility that music might be an instinct in this latter, stronger sense, and to compare that possibility with an alternative hypothesis: the notion that musicality1 might be better understood as a product of skill learning, akin to other complex skills, such as efficiently swinging a golf club or playing chess. 2. What is at stake Before considering criteria for how we might identify whether musicality is an instinct in a strong or weak sense, it is worth considering what is at stake or, more precisely, what is not at stake. It is not uncommon for lay people to see the status and prestige of music as being intimately tied to questions about music’s ontogenetic and phylogenetic origins. On this view, which might be seen as an instantiation of the naturalistic fallacy (Moore, 1903), music is perceived as valuable and worthwhile only to the extent that it is innate, inevitable, and the product of natural selection, and as less valuable to the extent that it is ‘‘merely’’ an acquired skill. Although such a coupling between music’s status and its origins may seem natural, there is in fact no logical connection between the two. One can, for instance, have respect and admiration for cinematographers, even though there was no cinematography in the environment of our evolutionary adaptation. At the same time, there are many aspects of our human nature that are almost certainly grounded in our evolutionary heritage, yet hardly things to be proud of, such as our tendency toward discrimination against out-groups (Allport, 1979). A second preliminary that must be recognized at the outset is that evaluating the stronger sense of music as instinct really depends on two questions that are logically separable but frequently confounded: the question of whether some capacity is innate, and the question of whether the machinery underlying its operation is implemented in a fashion that is domain- specific (as opposed to deriving from mechanisms that are domain-general). Although some machinery (e.g., for acquiring language) might plausibly be both innate and domain- specific, the knowledge and machinery that allow a grandmaster to play an expert game of chess, for example, are presumably largely domain-specific, tailored specifically to chess, yet emergent only through considerable practice, and thus presumably largely learned rather than innate. To the extent that any of the particular details of music are acquired over the life span of a child, rather than literally prewired into the brain, one can ask the domain-general- ity question with respect to developmental mechanisms: Is the machinery that subserves musical development tailored directly to the requirements of music, or does that machinery exist in advance of an individual’s experience with music and participates more broadly in a variety of domains, with music being just one among many? 1 A second question, equally fraught, but not addressed here, is what is meant by music per se, where notions of music so clearly vary across cultures. As the primary intent of the current article is to consider the developmental and evolutionary psychology of what draws humans to music rather than any particular musical tradition, I will sometimes use the word musicality, per a distinction stressed by Honing (2011), to refer to the act of creating, listening to, and enjoying music, rather than music, in the hope that some of my conclusions will extend beyond any particular genre or tradition of music.
G. F. Marcus ⁄ Topics in Cognitive Science (2012) 3 3. Criteria for innateness How do we know whether something is innate? The word innate itself has many meanings (Griffiths, 2002), again varying from weak to strong. Something might be said to be innate simply if it is inevitable and universal, independently of how it is wired in the brain—in this rather weak sense, knowledge that the sun sets to the West might be ‘‘innate,’’ even if each individual learns it anew in his or her own lifetime. Or, more strongly, something might be said to be innate only if the brain was wired in advance of experience to work in some partic- ular way. The strongest examples of innateness in this latter, stronger sense might be preco- cial behaviors, such as the capacity of a newborn horse to get up and walk almost immediately after birth, without requiring a great deal of trial and error (or parental instruc- tion) to grasp the basics. Although a horse refines its gait over time (partly as a matter of developing muscle tone), the overall schema for walking seems (in horses) to derive indepen- dently of experience. In this sense, it seems perfectly reasonable to say that a horse is born with an instinct for walking. Is human musicality similarly organized prior to experience? The looming point of comparison here (to which I will return later) is language, the domain in which arguments have perhaps most often been made for human innateness. Advocates of the innateness of human language have typically pointed to several arguments, such as the putative dissociability of language and other aspects of cognition (as in specific language impairment), the poverty of the input stimulus relative to the ultimate generative flexibility of language, the relatively young age at which languages are mastered, and the capacity of children to acquire language even in the absence of explicit negative feedback. At this juncture, one might ask both whether music would meet the same criteria, and whether those criteria are in fact adequate for establishing that language itself is innate (summarized by Pinker, 1994). Those familiar with the child language literature will recog- nize that even in the domain of language a great deal of controversy lingers: scholars such as Tomasello (2008) and Goldberg (2006) continue to argue that language is a cultural acquisition rather than something that is specifically innately specified. (Goldberg, for example, writes that ‘‘the cross-linguistic generalizations that exist are readily attributed to general cognitive, pragmatic, and processing constraints and do not require recourse to any genetic, domain-specific linguistic knowledge.’’) Here, I raise a comparable set of questions for musicality: What is the earliest evidence for musicality in children? How proficient are children at producing and comprehending music? To what extent do they rely on feedback? To what extent do they generalize beyond the input data? How resilient is the machinery for acquiring music? Is there evidence for a ‘‘music acquisition device’’ analogous to Chomsky’s idea of a ‘‘language acquisition device’’ (Chomsky, 1965), presumed to be governed by a rich universal ‘‘grammar’’ replete with specific constraints on what forms music could take in the human animal? At the same time, one might ask, if musicality were the product of skill learning, how would we know? Perhaps the single clearest hallmark of skill acquisition might be the sim- ple need for practice: reflexes, which virtually anyone can agree are innate, require essen- tially no practice; complex skills like expert-level chess playing require thousands of hours of practice (Ericsson, Prietula, & Cokely, 2007). Where does music fall?
4 G. F. Marcus ⁄ Topics in Cognitive Science (2012)
Of course, it must be acknowledged that musicality itself is multifaceted. Musicality
clearly consists of many different components, ranging from perceptual capacities for
detecting pitch and rhythm, as well as motor capacities, to emotional ⁄ theory of mind capaci-
ties for anticipating an audience’s reaction. Could some of those elements be seen as inborn
in domain-specific fashion, even if others are better seen as the product of a domain-general
process of skill acquisition?
4. Evidence for the innateness of music?
Researchers studying the musical capacities of human infants have uncovered a wide
range of musical capacities in infants, and even in newborns. Some of the highlights include
the following:
1. Consonance and dissonance. As early as 2 months, infants prefer listening to conso-
nance rather than dissonance (Trainor, Tsang, & Cheung, 2002).
2. Beat induction. In a simple, regular beat, newborns can recognize the omission of a
downbeat that marks the beginning of a rhythmic cycle (Winkler, Háden, Ladinig,
Sziller, & Honing, 2009).
3. Musical intervals. Almost all Western music depends in part on the tonal relations
between elements, and recent evidence suggests that even newborns are capable of
detecting a seven-semitone interval (e.g., C–G) amid a series of two-semitone intervals
(e.g., C–D) and vice versa (Stefanics et al., 2009).
4. Absolute pitch. Although there is some controversy, it may be that infants are sensitive
to the absolute frequency of pitched notes in certain stimuli (Saffran & Griepentrog,
2001). (Note, however, that infants cannot of course name individual notes, which is
the heart of what would be seen as absolute pitch in adults.)
5. Memory for melody. By 8 months, infants have the capacity to encode some melodies
in long-term memory (Trainor & Trehub, 1992).
6. Coordination between motion and rhythm. By 7 months, infants prefer listening to a
rhythmic pattern that is in time with a pattern of induced (bouncing) motion to a
rhythmic pattern that is out of synchrony with that induced motion (Phillips-Silver &
Trainor, 2005).
7. Neural specialization. A recent fMRI study suggests that in newborns’ brains, music
preferentially evokes the right hemisphere (Perani et al., 2010). More broadly speak-
ing, there is ample evidence that music has strong biological underpinnings (e.g.,
Koelsch & Siebel, 2005; Peretz, 2006; Schlaug et al., 2009).
In addition, there is strong evidence that in most if not all cultures, mothers sing to infants
and even ordinary adults can identify which of a pair of non-Western songs is directed at
infants at an above chance (63%) rate (Trehub, Unyk, & Trainor, 1993).
Does all this evidence merit the conclusion that musicality is in fact innate? The mere fact
that music is biologically instantiated tells us little about innateness, since even culturallyG. F. Marcus ⁄ Topics in Cognitive Science (2012) 5
specific skills like golf-playing (Jäncke, Koeneke, Hoppe, Rominger, & Hänggi, 2009)
appear to induce biological change but presumably are neither innate nor the product of
specific adaptation. Ultimately, the answer to questions about the developmental and evolu-
tionary origins of music depends in part on what is meant by musicality. Pitch and rhythm are
clearly components in most (although not all2) adult forms of music, and the connection
between music and the desire to move is near-universal.3 But if music were a genuine instinct,
one might expect a rich literature on musical universals; instead, recent reviews indicate that
cross-cultural universals in music are few in number, relatively weak, and difficult to specify
(Nettl, 2000). Stevens (2012), for example, notes that even the foundational presumption that
note frequencies are related to one another logarithmically (as they are in Western scales),
rather than linearly, has recently been challenged (by studies of Australian Aboriginal music);
Cross (2012) argues music itself can only be interpreted in terms of context, culture, and his-
tory. To the extent that there are relatively few firm universals, one has further reason to view
music as cultural invention, rather than a directly prewired instinct.
Indeed, many of the things that adults take for granted about music seem to be acquired
developmentally, and presumably they are acquired in early childhood, rather than present
at birth; many also appear to be culturally dependent. Consider the following.
1. Discrete notes. Most toddlers do not grasp the convention, near-universal in the West,
of singing discrete notes within a musical scale (such as the set of 12 chromatic notes,
C, C#, D, D#, etc.). Western children (the children whose musical development has
been most thoroughly documented) tend early in development to sing in a fashion that
is imprecise and inaccurate, with a great deal of gliding between notes (Davidson,
McKernon, & Gardner, 1981; Dowling, 1982).
2. Melodic contour. Children’s earliest efforts at singing—the productive component of
music that a priori could be most plausibly seen as an inborn product of evolu-
tion4—are focused largely around lyrical content rather than melodic contour (David-
son et al., 1981); it takes until the age of 4 or 5 before the typical child’s song is
recognizable by both melody as well as tune (Mckernon, 1979), and young children’s
memories for song seem to similarly be organized more around lyrics than contour
(Morrongiello & Roes, 1990).
2
Some forms of music have only rhythm without variation in pitch (e.g., some forms of pure percussion), and
other forms of music (e.g., recitative) have variation in pitch without any regular temporal periodicity. For
further discussion of musical universals and cross-cultural differences, see articles in this issue by Cross (2012)
and Stevens (2012). For an ethnomusicologist’s review of what might or might not be universal about music see
Nettl (2005).
3
Some individuals are tone-deaf, and some are largely indifferent to music, hence presumably not moved to
dance.
4
Singing is a more plausible candidate for an innate productive component of music than is playing instruments
since the modern vocal tract presumably preceded the discovery of musical instruments by tens of thousands of
years. The earliest known instrument is a bone flute (Conard, Malina, & Münzel, 2009), dated to 35,000 years
ago, whereas most estimates suggest that the vocal tract has not changed in at least the last 100,000 years. The
time line leaves open the possibility that singing could have been shaped by natural selection, but the recency of
musical instruments suggests instruments emerged after the bulk of human evolution was already complete.6 G. F. Marcus ⁄ Topics in Cognitive Science (2012)
3. Harmony and accompaniment. Although young children seem to be able to distinguish
dissonant chords from consonant chords, their overall understanding of harmony is
limited. There is some evidence that children under the age of 5 can detect harmonic
violations in familiar songs (Corrigall & Trainor, 2009) but less evidence that they can
do the same for unfamiliar songs, suggesting a lack of generalizable knowledge. Along
the same lines, many young children are largely unaware of whether the harmonic
backing accompaniment of a song is or is not consonant with the melody (Costa-
Giomi, 2003).
4. Practice. Musical ability is significantly correlated with amount of practice, even after
several years of significant investment (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993;
Sloboda, Davidson, Howe, & Moore, 1996), consistent with a view of music as an
acquired skill; the brain appears to follow suit with practice apparently eliciting neural
changes, even under controlled experimental conditions (Schlaug et al., 2009). This is
not only most obviously evident in musical performance but also in perceptual capaci-
ties such as the ability to perceive individual notes within a chord (Marco, McLachlan,
& Wilson, 2010). Furthermore, absent specific tuition, a sizable proportion of the pop-
ulation (perhaps 15%) never learns to carry a tune (Dalla Bella, Giguère, & Peretz,
2007; Pfordresher & Brown, 2007). Other putatively innate skills such as walking and
talking are far more uniformly acquired throughout the population.
5. Rhythmic independence. In production, all but the simplest rhythms require extensive
practice. Independence between limbs takes considerable effort to develop, and it may
never be fully achieved (Summers, 2002). Relative to machines that can create
arbitrary polyrhythms with a high degree of precision, humans struggle even with
relatively simple polyrhythms, unless steeped extensively in them (e.g., as in some
African cultures).
6. Perfect pitch. Whether or not there is an innate contribution, the ability to identify an
individual note by name in the absence of a reference point requires practice (Deutsch,
Henthorn, Marvin, & Xu, 2006).
7. Musical contour. Even relative pitch requires practice. Naive listeners are easily misled
by transpositions, suggesting a coarse representation of music (at least in memory).
Although the ability to recognize an isolated tone as the same or different is quite precise,
untrained listeners are often barely above chance in recognizing in-key alterations in
transpositions of even relatively short melodies (Cuddy & Cohen, 1976; Dowling, 1978).
More broadly speaking, although there is a strong case to be made that some of the rudi-
ments of music are inborn, there is also good reason to think that a significant part of musi-
cal attainment, both in production and comprehension, depends on practice, and likely on
culture, often taking years to develop. It is not just that, as the cliché goes, practice makes
perfect, or that high-level expertise takes years of practice (as amply documented by schol-
ars such as Ericsson and Sloboda, cited above), but that even ordinary garden-variety skills
that many adults take for granted, such as singing in key or representing a song in terms
of collections of discrete notes, appear to be learned achievements rather than automatic
elements of the human mind.G. F. Marcus ⁄ Topics in Cognitive Science (2012) 7
5. Evidence for the domain-specificity of music
To the extent that a reasonable case could be made for the proposition that at least some
of the rudiments of music are nonetheless in place in infancy without the need for significant
skill learning, one could ask whether those rudiments are specific to music. Remarkably
little is known about the extent to which early signs of musicality are reflections of domain-
specific or domain-general machinery. For example, although there is good evidence that
7-month-olds can recognize the synchrony (or lack of synchrony) between an audition and
motion (Phillips-Silver & Trainor, 2005), that synchrony might conceivably be just one
instantiation among many of a larger preference for cross-modal synchrony in infancy
(Lewkowicz, 2002) and across species (Stein & Stanford, 2008). Likewise Winkler et al.’s
(2009) recent work showing that infants recognize aberrant musical beats could represent a
particular predisposition to music but also simply be a particular instantiation of a general
tendency of the brain to recognize mismatches (Näätänen, Tervaniemi, Sussman, Paavilai-
nen, & Winkler, 2001). To the extent that non-vocal music has been directly compared with
speech, infants prefer speech (Standley & Madsen, 1990) and appear to be better at analyz-
ing it in an abstract way (Gervain, Berent, & Werker, 2009; Marcus, Fernandes, & Johnson,
2007).
Neurophysiologically, there is no clear ‘‘music center’’; rather brain substrates of music
largely consist of regions such as Broca’s area (Fadiga, Craighero, & D’Ausilio, 2009), pre-
frontal cortex (Bengtsson, Csı́kszentmihályi, & Ullén, 2007), and amygdala (Limb, 2006)
that play significant roles in non-musical activities, even in species that are not musical. In
particular, many studies have shown that there is overlap between the regions of the brain
that process speech and those that process music (e.g., Koelsch et al., 2004; Peretz &
Zatorre, 2005; Zatorre & Gandour, 2008). Music may rely on a unique configuration of
brain areas, but most if not all of those areas serve other purposes as well.
Ultimately, I concur with Trehub and Hannon (2006), who write that ‘‘the most parsimo-
nious interpretation of the available evidence is that infant skills are a product of general
perceptual mechanisms that are neither music- nor species-specific.’’
6. Natural selection?
Were ‘‘musical notes and rhythm … first acquired ... for the sake of charming the oppo-
site sex?’’ as Darwin wrote? Although it is commonly assumed that music is the product of
either natural or sexual selection (Darwin, 1874; Levitin, 2006; Miller, 2000), Pinker (1997)
and Patel (2010) have both argued that music may be a by-product of selection rather than a
direct product of selection.
In my judgment, the evidence that music is a product of natural selection is relatively
weak. A variety of adaptive pressures have been proposed, for example, for social cohesion,
communication, or conflict reduction (for reviews, see, e.g., Huron, 2001; Wallin, Merker,
& Brown, 2001; Fitch, 2006; and articles in the September 2009 issue of Musica Scientiae),
but aside from items such as a bone flute dated to approximately 35,000 years ago (Conard8 G. F. Marcus ⁄ Topics in Cognitive Science (2012) et al., 2009; d’Errico et al., 2003), little direct evidence for music exists, archaeological or otherwise, until sometime after most scholars believe language evolved (e.g., 50,000 years ago, according to Klein & Edgar, 2002; or several hundred thousand according to Bickerton, 2009), and although music is ubiquitous across cultures, many individuals prosper without being able to carry a tune; language impairments, by contrast, are far rarer. Perhaps the most vigorous argument for sexual selection comes from Miller (2000), who argues that music is a biological propensity that was shaped by sexual selection. Men play music because women like music; Miller’s flagship case is Jimi Hendrix who ‘‘had sexual liaisons with hundreds of groupies, maintained parallel long-term relationships with at least two women, and fathered at least three children in the United States, Germany, and Sweden. Under ancestral conditions before birth control, he would have fathered many more.’’ Miller also reports that in a sample of 6,000 recent jazz, rock, and classical albums, 90% were produced by men. Although Miller’s proposal is frequently cited, and was endorsed by Levitin (2006), there are several reasons to be skeptical (some noted before, e.g., by Huron, 2001 and by Fitch, 2006). First, in most aspects of physiology that are shaped by sexual selection, we generally see a significant dimorphism between men and women. Peacocks have plumage, their female counterparts do not; male songbirds sing, females generally do not. Although human data might initially seemed to have suggested a dimorphism in the human species, as Miller’s data on music recordings suggest, that apparent dimorphism instead likely reflects a histori- cal ⁄ sociological artifact rather than a necessary fact about human biology. For example, prior to the advent of blind auditions (in which aspiring musicians play behind a screen), men dras- tically outnumbered women in most orchestras; now most symphonies are near parity. Second, the sexual selection theory conflates the powerful image of a few exceptionally talented guitarists (such as Hendrix) with the realities of most musicians. Some musicians probably do indeed have a large number of mates, but sexual selection can serve as a plausi- ble explanation for the origin of music only if there is a net positive effect across all musi- cians, and I am aware of no data to suggest that. (Indeed, to the extent that mating success is correlated with income there is some reason to be skeptical. Only about half of college- degreed musicians, for instance, are even able to make a living in a musical career; Bennett, 2007.) Moreover, although Hendrix lived in a time in which it was possible for musicians to make millions of dollars and become internationally famous, whatever genes contributed to music evolved long before there were radio stations or record deals. Court jesters made music, too, but their status was hardly that of contemporary rock stars. Any serious theory of musical evolution must reckon with the fact that the life of a musician was not always as potentially prestigious as it is now. Third, theories in which music is seen as a specific target of natural or sexual selection might sometimes seem to imply the existence of specific music module in the brain that was somehow targeted by evolution, but as we saw earlier, there is no clear evidence of a distinct ‘‘music center’’ in the brain, but rather a coalition of neural tissue virtually none of which appears to be specialized for music. This in turn suggests that music might either be a by- product of heterogeneous evolution (Brattico & Jacobsen, 2009) or a simply a culturally acquired technology that draws on a diverse basis of (perhaps domain-general) components,
G. F. Marcus ⁄ Topics in Cognitive Science (2012) 9
rather than a specific target of selection. The available genetic evidence points in a similar
direction: no specific targeting of music during selection. Although musical aptitude seems
heritable (Drayna, Manichaikul, de Lange, Snieder, & Spector, 2001; Vinkhuyzen, van der
Sluis, Posthuma, & Boomsma, 2009), no gene has yet been specifically and uniquely tied to
music. More typical may be genes like AVPR1A (Ukkola, Onkamo, Raijas, Karma, &
Järvelä, 2009), which seems correlated with musical skill, but in a domain-general way that
is tied with social behavior more broadly construed (Ebstein et al., 2009). (Language, too,
may turn out to draw heavily on domain-general components, if recent neuroscience is a
guide; for a review of the genetic evidence, see Fisher & Marcus, 2006.)
Fourth, many theories of music evolution seem musically naı̈ve inasmuch as they treat all
music equally, leaving little room for the aesthetics of individual compositions, as if, for
example, any chord progression was as effective as any other, and as if all genres were
equally liked by all listeners. The reality is that some arrangements of notes move us; others
do not, both as a function of the composition of a given piece (a topic which few adaptation-
ist theories address) and as a function of broader personality variables (Rentfrow & Gosling,
2007), and group identification (Lonsdale & North, 2009). To the extent that adaptationist
theories ignore these differences, no one genre pleases everybody, and no one song pleases
everybody. A fully adequate theory would need to address both listener-wise differences
and the sort of common properties that music theory tries to characterize; one that treats
every melody equally should perhaps be viewed skeptically.
Another common claim is that music evolved because it leads to social bonding (Cross
& Morley, 2009). Although the data of Lonsdale and North (2009) confirm the wide-
spread intuition that music can indeed induce bonding, the mere coincidence between the
two is not enough to establish a causal evolutionary arrow. Theories that tie music to its
bonding capability typically do not engage with why particular patterns of sound orga-
nized over time should play any special role in bonding. Furthermore, they miss the fact
that many other things that manifestly were not part of our adaptive heritage—like the
cultural invention of drinking beer (perhaps 12,000 years ago, hence after most of human
evolution already occurred; Hayden, Canuel, & Shanse, 2012)—also induce social cohe-
sion. Likewise, although singing may soothe infants or facilitate mother-child bonding
(Trehub & Trainor, 1998), such functions may be side consequences of language, rather
than a direct adaptation (Fitch, 2006).
6.1. Music as cultural invention
My own view, then, consistent with Pinker (1997) and Patel (2010), is that musicality
should be seen not as a direct target of selection, but rather as something that the human
mind can—and often does, across a broad range of cultures—naturally acquire, given a
range of other mechanisms that were more directly selected for.
In keeping with this interpretation of the literature, it is worth reflecting briefly on the
history of music in our own culture, and the fact that many of the most salient aspects of mod-
ern music, such as keyboards, harmony, and the now ubiquitous 12 Bar Blues form, have only
a relatively brief history (Grout, Burkholder, & Palisca, 2006). With overdubs, Autotune,10 G. F. Marcus ⁄ Topics in Cognitive Science (2012)
harmony, drum machines, and so forth, contemporary music differs sharply from much of the
music that preceded it historically; new instruments and techniques often appear and rapidly
spread throughout the musical world in a way that is reminiscent of natural selection.
Although it would be folly to conclude that music has improved in an artistic sense over his-
torical time, it seems clear that the range of available tools and techniques has broadened
considerably. Just as auto manufacturers have improved their craft through a mixture of new
tools (like robots and power tools) and techniques (e.g., assembly lines), musicians draw on
an ever-expanding toolkit for entertaining human minds. Music may be as captivating as it is
partly because so many skilled practitioners have so actively developed the craft for so long.
7. If music is not innate, why do we love it so?
If music is not in fact an instinct in the strong sense, as I have tentatively argued, a new
question immediately arises: Why do we like music so much, if it is neither hard-wired nor
a specifically selected product of evolution?
The first thing to note, of course, is that across time and culture, different people have liked
different sorts of music. Synthesizers might well sound weird or even intolerable to many of
our prehistoric predecessors, and for some listeners the sounds of a sitar or gamelan ensemble
is at best an acquired taste. When it comes to the prevalence of musicality, above and beyond
variation in individual taste, I would suggest that there is not a single answer but many, and
that music is as compelling as it is precisely because it draws so heavily on such a broad range
of cognitive underpinnings. Consistent to some extent with Pinker (1997) and with Huron’s
(2005) suggestion that music yields ‘‘plural pleasures,’’ here is a partial list of domain-general
mechanisms that might collectively undergird music’s powerful hold on the human imagina-
tion, even if music were not per se either innate or a direct product of natural selection:
1. A domain-general preference for clearly parsable auditory stimuli, comparable to the
preference for hypernormal stimuli (e.g., Tinbergen, 1953) which makes us enjoy
(other things being equal) sharp, high-definition pictures more than pictures that are
low-resolution or out of focus. Instruments (especially traditional physical instru-
ments) have been selected to produce clear signals that are not muddied. Our prefer-
ence for consonance over dissonance (McDermott, Lehr, & Oxenham, 2010) could be
seen the same way: as domain-general reflexes of an internal aesthetic that strives to
avoid sensory degradation (Huron, 2005).
2. Liking for familiarity. Young children seem to have less clearly defined between-genre
preferences than adults (Hargreaves & North, 1999), and in any domain, music
included (North & Bargreaves, 1995; Schellenberg, Peretz, & Vieillard, 2008; Szpunar,
Schellenberg, & Pliner, 2004), people have a tendency to come to like that which is
familiar (Bornstein, 1989; Zajonc, 1968). At least in music, those preferences seem to
be shaped most strongly in adolescence, perhaps because that is when most people
spend the most time listening to music (North & Hargreaves, 1995).
3. Similarity to the human voice. From birth, the human voice is one of the most attrac-
tive stimuli to human beings (Vouloumanos & Werker, 2004, 2007), and early in lifeG. F. Marcus ⁄ Topics in Cognitive Science (2012) 11
it is preferred to purely instrumental music (Standley & Madsen, 1990). It is a com-
mon observation that many instrumentalists try to achieve an effect that is reminiscent
of the human voice (some would speculate that the violin achieves some of its potency
because of its capacity to do so), and there is good evidence that some of the emotional
mediators of instrumental music closely parallel modulators of emotion in speech
(Juslin & Laukka, 2003). Music that is most preferred often shares many characteris-
tics with speech, including prosody and phrasing. One study suggests that the proper-
ties of melodies by English and French composers echo differences in the stress
patterns of their languages (Patel, 2003), with the songs presumably having developed
more recently than the language’s respective stress patterns. A recent study of a large
sample of computer-generated fractal (1 ⁄ f ß) melodies suggests that the most preferred
melodies are those that most resemble speech in their spectral and temporal character-
istics (Beauvois, 2007).
4. A domain-general aesthetic preference, possibly derived from reward systems that pre-
date aesthetic pleasure altogether, for forms of input that yield reward both for novelty
(Bunzeck & Düzel, 2006; Guitart-Masip, Bunzeck, Stephan, Dolan, & Düzel, 2010)
and for correct predictions (Pessiglione, Seymour, Flandin, Dolan, & Frith, 2006).
Musicians can draw on a vast array of techniques such as repeating a familiar melody
with different lyrics, or a new melody set against a familiar rhythm, or with new
instrumentation, to simultaneously deliver novelty and familiarity in a single ever-
changing package.
5. Music may benefit, to some extent, relative to some other arts because of its intrinsi-
cally temporal nature (Kivy, 1993), which allows for extended bouts of the pleasure
that derives from the confluence of novelty and prediction.
6. Like all other arts, music may capitalize on its domain-general potential to serve as a
focal point for affiliation. People tend to like other people that share their preferences, and
because the possibilities of music are so diverse (especially in contemporary life, when
there are many specialized genres), there is great potential for differential affiliation based
on differential preference. One line of recent studies suggests that musical preferences
serve as potent and veridical group identifiers (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2006, 2007); another
suggests that in-group favoritism is indeed mediated to some degree by shared musical
preference (Lonsdale & North, 2009; Selfhout, Branje, ter Bogt, & Meeus, 2009).
In short, even if music is an instinct only in a weaker, more domain-general sense that
depends on extensive skill learning to fully develop, it lives in the company of a great many
of the mechanisms that bring us pleasure, and it should be no surprise that we enjoy it so
very much.
Acknowledgment
This article is dedicated to Denis Dutton (1944–2010), and his tireless efforts to under-
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