Debate continues regarding the purpose and practice of music in relation to participation, cultural origin, and education internationally. A Darwinian approach that sees musical vocalization as the adaptive bridge between animal communication and human language remains hotly disputed where such a model does not suit the prevailing political or social agenda. The two books under review present contrasting viewpoints and evidence, while their concurrent publication illustrates the rich potential for developments in this field. Friedmann’s edited book presents separate chapters by (...) sixteen independent authors cover­ing a range of specialisms and topics. Wood’s monograph is, by contrast, an encyclopaedic exploration of the earliest writings on musical theory from China, Greece, and India and their influence on the world’s music over the last 4,000 years. Read both separately and comparatively, these two publications offer a valuable contribution to our understanding of the phenomenon of music and its practice today. (shrink)

This article explores and examines research in the field of human vocalization, proposing an evolutionary sequence for human acoustic perception and productive response. This involves updating and extending Charles Darwin’s 1871 proposal that musical communi­cation predated language, while providing the anatomical and behavioral foundations for the articulacy on which it depends. In presenting evidence on which a new consensus regarding the emergence of human vocal ability may be based, we present and review contributions from a wide range of disciplines, illustrating (...) that the phenomenon of human musicality may have had more of a core function in shaping our anatomy and culture than has hitherto been recognized. Essential to the adaptive sequence on which this depends is human perceptual and productive response to the properties of the Harmonic Series. Both music and language have emerged from the auditory and performative consequences of this relationship. (shrink)

Debate continues regarding the purpose and practice of music in relation to participation, cultural origin, and education internationally. A Darwinian approach that sees musical vocalization as the adaptive bridge between animal communication and human language remains hotly disputed where such a model does not suit the prevailing political or social agenda. The two books under review present contrasting viewpoints and evidence, while their concurrent publication illustrates the rich potential for developments in this field. Friedmann’s edited book presents separate chapters by (...) sixteen independent authors cover­ing a range of specialisms and topics. Wood’s monograph is, by contrast, an encyclopaedic exploration of the earliest writings on musical theory from China, Greece, and India and their influence on the world’s music over the last 4,000 years. Read both separately and comparatively, these two publications offer a valuable contribution to our understanding of the phenomenon of music and its practice today. (shrink)