Experts agree with you:
Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar in Seattle who writes on the origins of artistic elaboration e finds a much stronger case for music's origins in its power to foster cooperation. The cradle of music, she argues, literally was the cradle, and in human evolution, music came from the bonding duets between mothers and infants. Modern humans evolved to bear especially helpless young, compared with those of other primates, so anything that strengthened the bond between mother and infant would have had strong, immediate survival benefits and would have spread widely.
Dissanayake sees evidence for this hypothesis in the tendency of caregivers around the world to engage infants in cooing, crowing, and peekabooing interactions that display many of the components of music. In many cultures, adults playing with babies tend to pump up the high inflections and drop the lows, so that the sounds they make take on a melodic quality. Think, for example, of simple statements such as "Look at YOU-oooo" and of many nursery games, such as the one that ends with "THIS little piggy went WEE-WEE-WEE all the way home." In addition, phrases are repeated, and adult and baby fall into rhythms. |
