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MINI REVIEW article
Front. Cognit.
Sec. Perception
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcogn.2025.1533913
This article is part of the Research Topic Music and Pro-sociality View all 5 articles
Music as a social instrument: a brief historical and conceptual perspective
Provisionally accepted- University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia
This article addresses the origins and purpose of communal music-making, including dance, and its role in human sociality. It accords special significance to the adapted nature of human vocalization, and the sensorimotor discrimination that allows the prediction and then generation of musically relevant, coordinated and simultaneous movements. Commencing with a historical survey of the development of ideas about the evolutionary importance of music in human social behaviour, this mini-review then sets out to define and explore key issues involved in an evolutionary explanation. These include: acquisition and control of parameters required for vocal production (synchronization of pitch, timbre, duration and loudness); the exchange and transmission of pitched utterances in unison as well as in harmony; the roles of natural and sexual selection in shaping human musical abilities; the nature of cooperative behaviour, and the consequences for social bonding of such interaction throughout life; transmission of such
Keywords: evolution, Music, cooperation, sociality, Reward, synchronization, dance
Received: 10 Dec 2024; Accepted: 10 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bannan and Harvey. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Alan R Harvey, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia
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