The first musical instrument used by our ancestors was the voice. The expansion of primary and association auditory cortices and their connections, associated with the increased size of the cerebellum and areas of prefrontal and premotor cortex linked through basal ganglia structures, heralded a shift to an aesthetics based on sound, and to abilities to entrain to external rhythmic inputs. In contrast, increases in size elsewhere in the human brain have occurred, notably in the temporal lobes, especially the dorsal area that relates to the auditory reception of speech. Thus, in other primates the size of the visual cortex correlates well with brain size, but in Homo sapiens it is smaller. One of the differences between the developed brains of Homo sapiens and those of the great apes is the increase in area allocated to processing auditory information. In the same way that there is a limited sensitive period in which the infant can learn language and learn to respond to spoken language, there must be a similar phase of brain development for the incorporation of music. Further, the frequency band which mothers use to sing to their babies, and so-called motherese or child-directed speech, with exaggerated intonation and rhythm, corresponds to that which composers have traditionally used in their melodies. It is naturally attuned to the sound of the human voice, although has a range greater than that required for speech. The mammalian middle ear developed from the jaw bones of earlier reptiles and carries sound at only specific frequencies. In other words, meaning in music came to us before meaning given by words. But, as the philosopher Susanne Langer noted, ‘The most highly developed type of such purely connotational semantic is music’ (Langer, 1951, p. Somewhere along the evolutionary way, our ancestors, with very limited language but with considerable emotional expression, began to articulate and gesticulate feelings: denotation before connotation.
Two features of our world which are universal and arguably have been a feature of an earlier evolutionary development are our ability to create and respond to music, and to dance to the beat of time. Bipedalism, the use of fire, the development of effective working memory and our vocal language efficient communication have all emerged from these genetic–environmental adaptations over several million years (Pasternak, 2007). There can be no doubt about the greater development of our cognitive attributes, linked closely with the evolutionary developments of our brain, in terms of both size and structure. Ascribed activities, from tool-making to having a theory of mind and empathy, have been rejected, as observations of anthropologists and ethnologists continue to emphasise similarities rather than differences placing us within the great chain of beings. There have been many attempts to identify behaviours which reliably distinguish our species, Homo sapiens, from our closest living cousins.
0 kommentar(er)
