At 01:41 PM 10/20/02 +0000, you wrote:
I'm changing the subject line on this thread. Because Music is not a Virus!There is an ongoing mystery about why so many creatures respond to it so strongly, since it seems to have little direct bearing on survival.
I have been quite taken by the work of Ian Cross, a professor at the University of Cambridge. I stumbled across his work quite recently, and will do my best to communicate his theory of music, but if you really want the whole story you should read his paper. The url is http://www.mus.cam.ac.uk/~ic108/MMS/
It's pretty heavy, so be prepared to print it out and read it carefully. Make some tea first. Get comfortable.
Here's the gist of his paper: Not sure which came first, or if the two sprung up together, but music and our modern mind (meaning the mind of Homo Sapiens, as opposed to Homo Erectus and the Neanderthals) depend upon each other.
The way our minds work, according to the people in academia who figure out this stuff, is there are distinct areas in our minds that work out different things for us. There's the language part, the motor-control part, the social part. The key to our modern human minds is that these parts of our brain can communicate with each other. We can think "across the lines". The question is, how did we gain this capacity?
If it just...happened...then music very likely grew out of this happening. Or, it could be that music developed first (I humbly suggest it may have developed from our drumming as we chased those beastly mammoths into the traps we dug). A compelling point is made when Dr. Cross notes that our Erectus and Neanderthal friends never left behind anything like musical instruments. But, he writes, "almost as soon as we humans start leaving any particularly complex artefacts lying around for archaeologists to find, they turn out to be musical instruments. In other words, more or less the first thing we did when we developed the capacity and desire to produce diverse and technologically complex objects...was to produce musical instruments."
Either way it happened, look at what music does:
Music is auditory. It works on the part of our brain that hears speech. It is muscular, as we use our hands, arms, lungs to make it. (recall that music as a listening-only activity is very recent.) Music thus links those distinct areas of our minds together, and so helps our minds /be/ modern. Music is a social activity....people play music together, or dance to music made by others in the social group, and so helps us be a community. It helps us develop that part of our mind that understands friendship. It enables individuals in the group to express "un-friendly" emotions...anger, for example...in the context of the group and so makes our social structure strong by helping to develop acceptable social behaviours.
I'm afraid I'm not saying this nearly as well as Dr. Cross. Of course, he took 11 pages of single spaced type to say what I'm trying to squeeze into an email. He finishes up his paper by saying that, at the very least, music has "contributed to the emergence of one of our most distinguishing features, our cognitive flexibility." In other words, without music we might never have evolved past Homo Erectus and the Neanderthals.
Far from having "little bearing on survival" Dr. Cross suggests that music is the most important thing that we humans ever did.
--Cynthia Cathcart
http://www.cynthiacathcart.net/
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