BY ELLIE PINKERTONHave you ever been unable to stop listening to a song that you’ve recently discovered has a catchy tune? Perhaps you’ve even gotten a song stuck in your head and can’t go the whole day without it incessantly intruding your thoughts. Well, whilst listening to music may seem like a very futile filler of your time, scientists have actually determined several psychological and biological functions of this inexplicable pastime. Humans began constructing musical instruments as far back as 40,000 years ago, whilst the birthdate of music as a whole is considerably older. A possible explanation for the conception of music is that it provided communication means prior to language systems. For instance, when one thinks about the various species of songbirds and their mating calls, it becomes easier to imagine the prevalence that music has. But, in comparison to songbirds, why do humans with their highly evolved intellect spend time both listening to music and/or devoting their lives to the composition of music? Scientists who support evolutionary musicology believe that music has a purpose rooted in our previous ancestors and their communication systems, similar to the manner of the songbird. Some argue that the development of music has had an adaptive advantage toward Darwin’s theory of evolution, claiming music to be the ‘protolanguage.’ Other various areas of study in musicology seek to understand not why music as a whole was created, but rather why it has stuck around and how it functions in the world around us. Some primary examples of this include:
And while music surely has developed from the first sing-song birds or rudimentary *‘protolanguages’ prior to human language systems, it is not only species that have influenced music, but also music that has influenced species. A strong example of this is a classic study by Cowell et al. in 1992, where musicians were found to have a more developed anterior corpus callosum, which is a collection of nerves connecting the left and right side of the brain. This study argues in support for some of these areas of musicology mentioned previously, that there is evidence that music significantly impacts cognition and neurophysiology. Additionally, music and instrument training have a strong relationship to memory cognition. Not the idea of listening to music while studying, which has a negative impact on memory, as shown in a study by Musliu et al. (2017); but rather that musicians as opposed to non-musicians tend to average higher on short-term and working memory tests. Lastly, of course we’d be crazy not to at least address the cultural impositions of music. Studies have shown that various aspects of a person’s ethnic influences play a significant role in their cognition of music, such as musical taste, memory, and emotional response. So, if you’re a Westerner, next time you have a song like ‘Gucci Gang’ stuck in your head, it’s fairly understandable to blame it on your upbringing. But all in all, music is a diverse aspect of life that, for the most part, is an elusive mystery to scientists and psychologists all over the world. Why do we enjoy listening to music? What real reasons do we still have to do so, even if we don’t rely on it for communication like our ancestors might have? Perhaps these are questions that will remain unanswered until we have the proper means to investigate this phenomenon. *Protolanguage is a theoretical language prior to formal language systems, to which scientists believe our language system is based off of †Computational models are mathematical studies of complex systems of behavior via computer simulations References Barras, C. (2014, September 7). Did early humans, or even animals, invent music? BBC Earth. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20140907-does-music-pre-date-modern-man Musliu, A., Berisha, B., & Latifi, D. (2017). The Impact of Music in Memory. European Journal of Social Sciences Education and Research, 10(2), 222. https://doi.org/10.26417/ejser.v10i2.p222-227 Schäfer, T., Sedlmeier, P., Städtler, C., & Huron, D. (2013). The psychological functions of music listening. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 511. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00511 Talamini, F., Altoè, G., Carretti, B., & Grassi, M. (2017). Musicians have better memory than nonmusicians: A meta-analysis. PLOS ONE, 12(10), e0186773. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0186773
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