Towards an ethology of song: A categorization of musical behaviour

This paper deals with the differentiation and adaptive significance of musical, particularly singing behaviour. We discuss the relationship of speech and song and define song as a musical mode of speech. We argue for a focus on singing as the primary form of musical expression and discuss universal functions of singing as a mode of human communication and their possible adaptive significance. Starting from these universal capacities, from a number of recently discussed candidates for adaptive functions, and from the record of various cultural gender and biological sex differentiations related to music, a categorization of musical (particularly singing) behaviour, primarily based on sex differentiation, is proposed.