Social Bonding
One theory about music is that it exists to support social bonding.
Some aspects of music are indeed social. For example:
- People make music together, be it a band or a choir or a whole orchestra.
- People can go to concerts and all listen to the same music.
Of course many aspects of human behaviour are social because human beings are very social animals. But for any given type of behaviour, the sociality of that behaviour does not imply that the behaviour exists for the purpose of supporting sociality.
For example, people often eat together. And sometimes they cook together. But the primary purpose of eating and cooking is not to be social.
Some behaviours are social because, at least some of the time, it is more efficient to do something in a group.
In a less-technological prehistoric past, people almost had to make music together.
One person can make music by themselves, by singing acapella. But in practice it is much easier to get a good result if a group of people sing, because any pitch errors tend to average out.
In the very modern world, the number of people required to produce music that you want to listen to is zero, because we have machines that can play back recorded music. But that is because of very fancy technologies like MP3 players and the internet. If we want to understand the evolutionary logic of music, then we can go a little way back in time to when those technologies did not exist.
Maladaptive Daydreaming
One group of people who are very strongly affected by music are maladaptive daydreamers, where listening to music triggers intense daydreaming sessions that can last for hours.
The addiction to music-inspired daydreaming can be so intense that it negatively affects the person’s overall success in life – if you’re always intensely daydreaming, then you’re not doing other things like socialising, or working, or studying, or even doing the housework.
Maladaptive daydreaming is a very private and non-social activity – it is something that a person does when there is noone else around.
This suggests the possibility that the original function of music was not it’s effect on social activity, but rather the effect it had on private imagination.
Social Production, Non-Social Consumption
Presumably, music-driven maladaptive daydreamers existed in less technological societies in the past.
But, at the same time, they would have been constrained to only hear sufficiently high quality music in the presence of other people producing music.
So there would be a situation of public production and private consumption.
We can hypothesize that this extended to all listeners, that is, music was produced by the group, for the purpose of enabling the private consumption of music by each individual in the group.
We can think of it like a drug, where everyone wants to enjoy a particular drug, but, for some reason the drug is only available if there’s a group of people together producing the drug for immediate consumption.
Reasons why Production Had to Be Social
If the primary purpose of music consumption is private and non-social, then why did the production of music have to be social?
Why couldn’t our brains evolve to be satisfied with listening to the musical output of an amateur solo singer (ie each person just singing to themself)?
Under the assumption that the consumption of music has purely individual private benefit, and that this consumption involves entering an altered state of mind, then there are two plausible reasons I can think of why it would be beneficial for the production of high quality music to be constrained to social group performance:
- If high quality music only happens when the group performs it, then the performance of music is necessarily limited to those times when everyone agrees to get together and perform music. Even for someone strongly inclined to daydream to music for all their waking hours, they would only be able to enter that state when other people were inclined to do a group musical performance. And other people have other stuff that they need to do, so they can’t be performing music all the time.
- Consuming music while being part of a group that is producing music also has safety benefits, especially if that consumption involves an altered state of mind. If you consume your own music produced by yourself and there’s no one else around, then you are more vulnerable to a surprise physical attack (from someone in your own society, or from a neighbouring tribe, or maybe even a wild animal).