Antecedents of the temporal arts in early mother-infant interaction

Speculations about the biological origins of music,like other human social behaviors, typically assume that competition affecting reproductive success was and is the ultimate evolutionary driving force. A different approach maintains that human music originated in perceptual, behavioral, cognitive, and emotional competencies and sensitivities that developed from primate precursors in survival-enhancing affiliative interactions (using ritualized packages of sequential vocal, facial, and kinesic behaviors) between mothers and infants under six months of age. Thus music in its origins is viewed as a multimedially presented and multi-modally processed activity of temporally and spatially patterned-exaggerated and regularized-vocal, bodily, and even facial movements. It is held that because of increasing infant altriciality during hominization, the primate propensity for relationship or emotional communion, not simply sociability, became so crucial that special affiliative mechanisms evolved to enhance and ensure it. These mechanisms in turn could be further developed (as temporal arts, including music) to serve affiliative bonding among adults in a species where close cooperation also became unprecedentedly critical for individual survival. That musical ability (like any variable attribute) can be and is used competitively in particular instances is not denied. However, the hypothesis offered here is able to address and account for music's specific and widely attested power to coordinate and conjoin individuals, both physically and psychologically.