Synchronous Chorusing and Human Origins

Abstract

Evenly paced time marking in measured music allows us to predict where the next beat is going to fall. This makes musical pulse a cardinal device for coordinating the behavior of several individuals in a joint, coherent, synchronized performance. Such behavioral synchrony to a regular beat on the part of many individuals is rare among higher animals and raises the question of its origination in anthropogenesis. The fit between one of the evolutionary models proposed to explain synchronous chorusing in insects and basic aspects of our earliest hominid ancestors’ social structure suggests that synchronous chorusing may have played a fundamental and hitherto unsuspected role in the process of hominid divergence from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee. The possible elaboration of such an adaptation through female choice (acting both between and within groups of cooperatively chorusing males) and vocal learning (in both its receptive and productive modalities) is discussed with reference to hominoid behavior, the fossil record of hominid brain expansion, and its bearing on the relationship between the origins of language and of music.