The singing neanderthals pdf

Other cases are known, such as an autistic young man named Noel who could perform near-perfect renditions of classical pieces that he had just heard. The exceptions were either blind or had some language deficits, although less severe than those of the musical savants. Several of the adults were professional pianists. These tests provided a considerable challenge, especially when the subjects had a tendency towards echolalia.

All thirteen were identified as having perfect pitch also known as absolute pitch — the ability to identify or to sing a note of a specific pitch to order. Although this may be widespread and perhaps even universal in very young children, only one adult in every ten thousand has perfect pitch. Both Miller and Beate Hermelin, another psychologist specializing in savants, have concluded that the possession of perfect pitch is most likely a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for the development of musical abilities in cognitively impaired children because it provides the basic building blocks for understanding more complex musical structures.

Unlike other types of language deficits, echolalia requires sensitivity to sound and an appreciation of how sounds are combined together to make sequences. A similar gender bias is found in the case of autistic children and adults, among whom there is also a high incidence of perfect pitch. In contrast, they displayed a level of musical understanding similar to that possessed by professional musicians.

The extent to which they practised and had lessons varied hugely. Some, like Blind Tom and CA, had had long periods of intensive tutoring, repeatedly playing the same piece until they had mastered it; others appear to have been more spontaneous.

Eddie rarely practised the piano. In every case, however, their musical knowledge was extensive, with no particular holes or deficits. It included sensitivity to the rules of musical composition, enabling them to improvise and to capture immediately the essence of a piece of music. These were always faithful to the style and ambience of the original.

With their seemingly complete mastery of savants appear to contrast with other types of are those who are able to provide the day of the week for any given calendar date with apparently minimal effort. This is a remarkable mathematical feat and, like musical savants, they must achieve it by having an implicit understanding of the rules underlying how days are defined rather than a reliance on rote memory.

But the mathematical talent of calendar calculators rarely extends to other areas of mathematics, in which they often appear inept. Hyperlexic savants appear to be similarly limited. Unlike Eddie with his music, they cannot extract the gist of a story. He had begun attending a new school and now had a music teacher who took him, to recitals, where Eddie could sometimes play with the professional musicians.

I found that a walk with Eddie is a journey through a panorama of sounds. He runs his hand along metal gates to hear the rattle; he bangs on every lamp post and names the pitch if it has good tone; he stops to hear a car stereo; he looks into the sky to track airplanes and helicopters; he imitates the birds chirping; he points out the trucks rumbling down the street. Shebalin, NS, Eddie and those others we have so far considered all demonstrate that the capacity for music can exist within the brain in the absence of language.

But is the converse also true? Can language exist without music? This double dissociation does indeed exist, as will become apparent from the following accounts of people who either lost their musical abilities while retaining those for language, or who simply never developed any musical ability at all. The word for this condition is amusia, the musical equivalent of aphasia. Although reference will be made to the work of numerous scientists as we examine various case histories of amusia, that of Dr Isabelle Peretz of Montreal University is of most significance.

She has undertaken extensive studies of amusia and discovered many important aspects of this condition. In particular, she has found compelling evidence that the capacity for music is not a single entity in the brain but is constituted of which can be lost while others remain intact.

Moreover, some appear to be dedicated to music while others are evidently shared by the language system. We must start with another professional musician and a case that is neither strictly one of amusia nor of aphasia. Imagine a whole opera sitting there. The inability to write is called agraphia. Ravel began to suffer intense frustration, flying into rages when he could not find the words he wanted to say.

Unlike Shebalin, however, he remained able to express himself and to understand speech. He died acutely aware of how his illness had left him able to compose music in his head but quite unable to write it down. When listening to these, Ravel could detect any departures from what he had originally written, indicating that his hearing remained intact. But sight-reading, writing down new works, and playing from a score were entirely lost.

His key deficit was in translating musical representations from one modality — hearing them inside his head — to another — writing them down on paper or playing them on a piano. Although discussion of his case in recent medical and science journals has been informed by advances in our understanding of the brain, no firm conclusions can now be drawn.

The best guess is that Ravel suffered from a degeneration of the posterior region of the left cerebral hemisphere, in the superior temporal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobe. Disturbance to these areas is known to cause amusia, but the loss of selective musical abilities may have arisen from degeneration of other brain areas. HJ suffered a stroke in , resulting in severe amusia while leaving his abilities for language, reasoning, writing, concentration and memory unaffected.

He also reported that he felt the sound of his singing had changed for the worse and that he had forgotten how to play his clarinet and harmonica. He seems to have suffered much the same as Ravel — an inability to express the music that he continued to experience within his head. He was an enthusiastic subject, keen to understand his condition, but often became angry and distressed at the loss of his musical abilities.

Such feelings arose when he attempted to perform by either singing or playing instruments: he was perfectly able to recognize the errors he made but quite unable to rectify them. Before his stroke, HJ had been a keen pianist and had received lessons throughout his childhood. When asked to play some familiar songs from his repertoire and some major scales, Wilson noted how he would seat himself and position his hands at the piano quite correctly.

But when he began to play he made repeated mistakes with the fingering of his right hand, which lacked fluency. His left hand was even worse, appearing clumsy and often entirely unable to find the correct finger patterns. In fact, his hands appeared to play independently of each other, so any elements of melody, rhythm and harmony he could produce were dissociated from one another.

He would begin a song by correctly playing the opening but then he appeared unable to recall the chord progressions, sometimes omitting them and skipping from the opening line to a later, similar phrase.

On other occasions his two hands would become entirely uncoordinated, fingering a simple melody with the right hand while repeatedly playing the same chord with the left. Ravel might have been suffering from something similar when he jumped from the first movement to the finale in his Madrid performance of Sonatine in November These often ended abruptly, lacking musical phrasing and generally suffering from a blurring of the notes by an overuse of the sustain pedal.

He suffered from difficulty in translating his auditory representations into the correct sequence of finger movements. This was most likely caused by damage to his right inferior parietal lobe, as revealed by a CT scan, which would explain why his left rather than his right hand was most seriously affected. Unsurprisingly, HJ showed his greatest deficit when attempting to play hew pieces.

When asked to play on the piano some very simple melodic passages for one-handed sight-reading, he was able to achieve this for the right hand but not the left, even though he could correctly identify the notes. He found the effort of trying to transpose the notes of the music from his mind to the fingers of his left hand so distressing that he refused to complete the tasks.

Wilson commented that his fingers seemed totally unable to find their way around the piano keys. When singing sounds like shouting In December a twenty-year-old man was referred to Professor Massimo Piccirilli and his colleagues at the Medical School and Institute of Neurology of the University of Perugia. An emergency brain scan showed a haematoma — a tumour filled with blood-in the left temporal region. Although immediate tests revealed that the patient was experiencing substantial difficulties with comprehension, writing and reading, a rapid and spontaneous improvement had begun within a few days.

Although he had not learnt to read music, he had practised the guitar since the age of fourteen and formed a band with his friends in which he both played and sang. Similarly, HJ had been able to play the piano, clarinet, drums and harmonica, was often asked to play at social functions and particularly enjoyed improvising on the piano. All proved absolutely normal. He was able correctly to identify environmental sounds and to tell whether they emanated from people for example, coughing or laughing , animals, nature for instance, running water , vehicles or machines.

He was also able to recognize the prosodic tone of a spoken phrase, correctly identifying the mood of the speaker. But something had certainly happened to his musical abilities — or at least to some of them. The patient could not identify familiar melodies, those that are commonly hummed or well known such as the national anthem. Neither could he recognize what had once been his favourite musical pieces. But he could recognize the intensity of a piece of music and its timbre which varies with the instrument being played , as well as familiar rhythms such as the waltz or tango.

A whole battery of detailed tests confirmed that while the patient had entirely lost his ability to process melody, he remained competent at processing rhythm and timbre. So, as we found with the loss of language in cases of aphasia, the extent to which the various components that make up our musical abilities are lost or preserved varies considerably in cases of amusia. Although a non-musician, GL was a keen listener to popular and classical music, and frequently attended concerts.

In he suffered an aneurysm of the right middle cerebral artery. After this was clipped he recovered and was able to return to work, with no apparent symptoms. Two years of speech therapy enabled him to recover his language abilities, and his lifestyle was now similar to that of any other well-off retired person — with one substantial exception. The second aneurysm; had caused permanent amusia, and GL was no longer able to enjoy music A CT scan in confirmed lesions in the left temporal lobe and the right frontal opercular region of the brain.

During the course of a year she performed an extensive series of tests in an attempt to identify its precise nature. First, she assessed his cognitive and motor abilities in general, such as memory, language and visual discrimination. These were all quite normal and reflected his high educational attainment. Moreover, he was also found to be quite normal at recognizing animal cries, environmental noises and the sounds of specific musical instruments.

But his amusia was severe. He failed to identify a single one out of musical excerpts that were judged to be familiar to residents of Quebec at the time and which he would undoubtedly have been able to identify prior to his brain damage. For instance, when played successive notes on the piano, he could state whether they were of the same or different pitches. His ability at pitch recognition was, in fact, no different from that of five controls — normal subjects of the same sex and similar age, and with equivalent educational and musical experience.

Similarly, he was able to recognize whether pieces of music had the same or different rhythms, and was able to make use of contours — the manner in which pieces of music rise and fall in pitch as they are played-in discrimination tasks. Where GL failed was on those tests that required the use of tonal knowledge — those implicit rules we possess about how music should be structured.

There is a consensus among musicologists that we acquire such knowledge very early in childhood, without explicit tutoring, and that it is essential for musical experience.

As I noted in chapter 2, one might compare it with the grammatical knowledge that we also automatically acquire at an early age, although the two are not strictly equivalent. Peretz provides a succinct summary of tonal knowledge:. In our [i. Moreover, only a small subset of these pitches is generally used in a given piece, i. The most common scale used in popular Western music is the diatonic scale, which contains seven tones, repeated at octave intervals.

The structure of the scale is fixed and asymmetrical in terms of pitch distance. It is built of five whole steps and two half steps. Scale tones are not equivalent and are organized around a central tone, called the tonic. Usually a piece starts and ends on the tonic. Among the other scale or diatonic tones, there is a hierarchy of importance or stability, with the fifth scale tone — often substituting for the tonic — and the third scale tone being more closely related to the tonic than the other scale tones.

Together, the tonic, the third and the fifth form what is referred to as a major triad chord, which provides a strong cue for the sense of key. While the specific character of these rules relates to Western music, we should note that the use of scales is universal in music.

The majority of scales have some common properties: most make use of pitches an octave apart, and are organized around five to seven focal pitches. This relatively small number might, it has been suggested, relate to cognitive constraints on human memory. By having implicitly acquired tonal knowledge, listeners can readily detect tones that depart from the scale of a melody.

Moreover, Western listeners have a strong aesthetic preference for listening to music that conforms to their tonal system. There can be little doubt that, prior to his brain damage, GL possessed such implicit tonal knowledge; this would have provided the basis for his immense enjoyment of music.

Peretz played GL and control subjects a set of melodies and asked them to pick out those that sounded complete. All the melodies ended with a descending pitch contour, but only some of them had the tonic at the end and so would normally be recognized as complete. In another test, Peretz examined whether GL had a preference for tonal or atonal melodies. As one might expect, the control subjects had a strong preference for the former, but GL could not even tell them apart. He complained that the test did not make any sense to him; he could hear the differences but did not know how to interpret them.

HJ, the sufferer who, like Ravel, could still hear music within his head was also unable to distinguish between tonal and atonal melodies, and he failed, too, on other tasks relating to tonal knowledge that he knew he would his stroke. When this is lacking, Peretz argues, an inevitable consequence will be an inability to recognize melodies. The significance of words The next case concerns another dissociation, this time between song and melody.

Singing is an important topic because it involves the integration of both melody and speech — music and language. Whether the words and melodies of songs are stored in memory independently of each other or in some integrated form remains a point of contention among neuro-psychologists, although there has been limited research into the issue.

This makes the case of KB, a Canadian man who suffered a stroke at the age of sixty-four, all the more interesting because it provides some clues as to how the lyrics and the melody of the same song are stored within the brain. He had played trumpet and drums at school, and spent ten years singing in a barbershop quartet and in amateur operettas.

He sang frequently at home and regularly listened to his large collection of jazz and classical records. In July , KB was admitted to hospital after he suffered a stroke causing left-sided paralysis and speech difficulties.

A series of CT scans showed focal damage in the right fronto-parietal area and to a lesser extent in the right cerebellum. After a period of convalescence, KB was subjected to a battery of psychological tests. With the exception of some minor deficits, his speech had recovered and his memory was unimpaired.

But he had suffered a slight decline in his general intellectual functioning, experiencing difficulties in tasks such as sequencing symbols and alternating between alphabetic and numeric symbols. Most of his mistakes were not unusual, such as confusing an oboe with a bassoon. But some musical abilities had been lost, and tests led to the diagnosis of amusia. KB himself recognized this, finding that he sounded flat when singing aloud and that music no longer had any interest for him.

After his stroke, he no longer listened to his record collection and avoided musical performances or activities. As in other case studies, they compared his performance in a series of tests against a set of controls, people of similar age and musical background to KB but with quite normal musical abilities. Steinke also found that KB could identify some instrumental melodies — those for which he had at one time learned some lyrics, such as the Wedding March and the William Tell Overture.

Further sets of tests were undertaken to confirm and explore this surprising finding. It was shown to be very robust. It was even found that KB could learn new melodies if they were presented in the context of songs with lyrics, although in such cases his learning ability was limited. He showed a deficit when asked to identify a song melody while the lyrics to a quite different song were being played; the controls had a significantly higher success rate at this task than KB.

Steinke and his colleagues tested, and then rejected, the idea that song melodies have a different structure from instrumental melodies, which might make them easier to identify. They also rejected the notion that KB might have been generally more familiar with song than with instrumental melodies; his musical background was quite the opposite.

In any case, that would not explain his ability to recognize those instrumental melodies for which he had once learnt some lyrics, or his continuing ability, albeit limited, to learn new melodies when they were presented with lyrics. They proposed that melody and lyrics are actually stored separately in the brain but nevertheless remain connected so that one can act as a means to recall the other. Consequently, every time we hear a familiar song two interconnected neural systems are involved.

Repeated listening to a song builds strong neural links between these two systems, so that activation of one will automatically stimulate the other: when the melody of a song is played one will recall the lyrics, and vice versa.

Support for the hypothesis of a separation between memory for tune and memory for lyrics comes from the case of GL, the Quebec businessman who lost tonal knowledge, and that of another sufferer, known as CN, who in , at the age of thirty-five, suffered brain damage that caused amusia but left her language capabilities intact. Both GL and CN were able to recognize the lyrics of familiar melodies when they were sung to them, but were unable to recognize the corresponding tunes. He could identify the choruses from songs but was quite unable to identify melodies that had never had an association with lyrics.

The memorizing of songs establishes a more extensive and elaborate network of information in the brain because both the speech memory and the melody memory systems are involved. This makes the recognition of a song melody easier, because more neural circuits are stimulated when the music is played than is the case when a melody is purely instrumental in nature.

With regard to KB, Steinke suggested that a sufficient amount of his severely damaged melody analysis system had survived for it to activate his speech analysis system when he heard a familiar song melody. This enabled him to identify the melody, even though he was not hearing the words that would normally accompany it.

When listening to an instrumental melody, there was no stimulation of neural circuits beyond his damaged melody analysis system and so he failed at the recognition task.

This would also explain why KB had some limited ability to learn new songs but not instrumental melodies: the former activated the speech analysis system as well as the remnants of his melody analysis system, building up a relatively elaborate neural network which facilitated memory formation. We can also understand why KB struggled to recall song melodies when they were played with the lyrics to a different melody. If his melody analysis system had been intact, then its activation would have been sufficient to overcome the interference, allowing recognition of both the melody and the lyrics, as was the case with the controls.

Prosody, as this is called, can sound very music-like, especially when exaggerated, as in the speech used to address young children. And it has a musical equivalent in melodic contour — the way pitch rises and falls as a piece of music is played out. We have already seen that prosody has been variously maintained or lost in those who have suffered from either aphasia or amusia.

This has, however, been reported as little more than an incidental observation. Consequently, a study published in by Isabelle Peretz and her colleagues is particularly important because it explicitly attempts to identify whether the same neural network within the brain processes sentence prosody and melodic contour, or whether independent systems are used.

Like CN, IR was a French- speaking woman, and she had a similar history of brain damage in both left and right cerebral hemispheres. When examined by Peretz, they were forty and thirty-eight years old respectively, and had experienced their brain injuries seven and nine years previously.

Both suffered from amusia, and by that time neither had sufficiently significant speech deficits to warrant the diagnosis of aphasia. CN had bilateral lesions on the superior temporal gyrus. She had normal intellectual and memory abilities for her age and education, but auditory deficits that inhibited her processing of music to a much greater extent than speech and environmental sounds. Although she could understand speech, initial tests had suggested that CN was impaired in judging intonation and interpreting pause locations in sentences.

IR had more extensive damage to both sides of the brain and had initially suffered from aphasia as well as amusia. Her understanding of speech had returned; she, too, had normal intellectual and memory abilities, and she could recognize environmental sounds. But IR was entirely unable to sing even an isolated single pitch. They began with sixty-eight spoken sentences, recorded as pairs, that were lexically identical but differed in their prosody and hence their meaning.

The acoustics of each pair of sentences were very carefully manipulated using a computer program in order to ensure that they were identical in their loudness and timing. These were also controlled for their loudness, but variation in pitch between the sentences of a pair could not be removed without them sounding quite unnatural. CN, IR and eight female control subjects of similar age, musical background and educational history as CN and IR but with no history of neurological trauma, were played pairs of these sentences, some of which were different and some identical.

The clever part of the test was then to translate each sentence into a melodic phrase. Since the question-statement pairs and the focus-shift pairs had already been standardized for loudness and timing, each pair of sentences formed a pair of melodies that differed only in pitch contour.

In terms of length, loudness and timing, they were identical to the spoken sentences. With this experimental design, the question that Peretz and her colleagues were seeking to answer was whether CN and IR would prove equally successful at distinguishing whether the sentence and the melody pairs were the same or different. If so, the implication would be that a single neural network is used to process the prosody of sentences and the pitch contour of melodies.

If they were able to recognize the prosody of sentences, by successfully identifying whether they were the same or different, but unable to process pitch contour, or vice versa, the implication would be that different neural networks are used for these aspects of language and music.

Of all the experimental procedures designated to investigate aphasia and amusia of which I am aware, this is undoubtedly one of the most meticulously designed and thoroughly executed. The results were very striking indeed. CN performed as well as the control subjects at identifying whether paired sentences and paired melodies were the same or different, for each of the three classes of sentence statement—question, focus-shift and timing-shift.

She was, in other words, quite normal as regards the processing of both speech prosody and pitch contour. This highlighted the specificity of the deficits causing her amusia — long-term memory for melody and perception of tonality.

In contrast to CN and the control subjects, IR could process neither speech prosody nor pitch contour. Additional tests showed that this did not arise from an inability to detect pitch. IR was able to discriminate between questions and statements when they were presented either as sentences or as melodic analogues. She could also detect which word of a sentence or phrase of a melody had an accentuated pitch, and where pauses were located.

What she appeared to be able to do was to hold patterns of speech prosody and patterns of pitch contour in her short-term memory. As CN was able to process both speech prosody and pitch contour, while IR was able to process neither, Peretz and her colleagues concluded that there is indeed a stage at which the processing of language and Of melody utilize a single, shared neural network.

Born without music In the previous chapter we considered musical savants — Children who are deficient in their language capacities but appear to be quite normal or even to excel with regard to music. Such children demonstrate that some degree of separation between language and music exists in the brain from the early stages of development, rather than this being a property of the adult brain alone. We can now undertake the complementary study, those who are born with severe musical deficiencies but are nevertheless quite normal with regard to language.

Unlike the case histories of amusia I have so far discussed, this man who remained unnamed had not suffered any brain damage: he had been deficient in musical ability from birth. This was not due to lack of effort on his part, for he had taken singing and piano lessons, both of which had proved entirely unsuccessful.

When Allen undertook a series of tests on him, he was found to be quite unable to distinguish between any two adjacent notes on the piano. Some ability to perceive rhythm was present, because he could identify some tunes by their timing alone. He could also recognize the general character of a piece — whether it was lively, bright, tender, solemn or majestic — by relying on its loudness and rhythms.

He was described as speaking in a rather monotonous voice, little modulated by emotional tones. His paper now reads as an interesting but anecdotal report rather than a systematic study, and this is also the case with further reports of supposedly note-deaf or tone-deaf people that appeared over the next hundred years.

Even two large-scale studies published in and , which concluded that per cent of the British population was tone-deaf, have been deemed unreliable. The leading scientist of the study was Isabelle Peretz, who simply advertised for volunteers who believed that they had been born tone-deaf. A large number of responses was received and people were interviewed.

From these, a smaller number were selected and tested, of whom twenty-two showed unambiguous signs of amusia and fulfilled four necessary criteria for it to be considered a congenital condition. First, they had to have achieved a high level of educational attainment, in order to guard against their amusia being a consequence of general learning difficulties; secondly, they had to have had music lessons in childhood, so as to ensure that their amusia had not arisen from limited exposure to music.

Finally, they had to have had no history of neurological or psychiatric illness. Of the twenty-two subjects who met these criteria, the most clear-cut case was that of Monica, a French-speaking woman in her early forties. Music had always sounded like noise to Monica and she had never been able to sing or dance. When social pressure forced her to join a church choir and school band she experienced great stress and embarrassment. Peretz and her colleagues subjected Monica to the same battery of tests that they used on their brain-damaged patients, measuring her performance against other women of a similar age and education but of normal musical ability.

The majority of tests were based around identifying whether pairs of melodies were the same or different, with the investigators manipulating some of them in order to explore whether Monica could recognize changes in pitch contour and intervals. She could not.

Neither could she perceive changes in rhythm. She did show some ability to recognize different metres when she was asked to discriminate between melodies that were waltzes and marches, but even here she was only correct in nineteen out of thirty attempts.

As with the other amusia sufferers described above, Monica was unable to identify familiar melodies. Since she was quite adept at identifying familiar speakers from their voices, this could not be explained by poor hearing, memory or inattentiveness.

This finding differs from the cases of IR, who could process neither prosody nor pitch contour, and of CN, who could process both. But it was not just Monica: ten more of those who had responded to the advertisement and showed the same congenital amusia as Monica were also found to be deficient in their ability to detect variations in pitch, although some maintained a limited ability to appreciate rhythm.

Like Monica, their disorder was entirely music-specific. This group study of congenital amusia confirmed that patterns of speech intonation could still be recognized; those with congenital amusia had the same ability to recognize intonation and prosody in spoken language as a set of control subjects. But when the linguistic information was removed, leaving just the acoustic waveform of the sentence, the success rate of the group with amusia was significantly reduced. So their success at the prosody tasks appears to have been dependent upon having the word cues to support discrimination between sentences.

This sounds very similar to the aid that lyrics gave to melody recognition in the case of KB. As with the study of Monica alone, Peretz and her colleagues concluded that the underlying cause of congenital amusia was a defect in the ability to recognize pitch.

They acknowledged that most of their subjects suffered from deficiencies in musical abilities seemingly unrelated to pitch, such as memory for melodies, the discrimination of melodies by rhythm, and the ability to keep time. Moreover, it is apparent that both language and music are constituted by a series of mental modules.

These also have a degree of independence from one another, so that one can acquire or be born with a deficit in one specific area of music or language processing but not in others. The separation of the modular music and language systems, however, is not complete, as several modules, such as prosody, appear to be shared between two systems. Isabelle Peretz has concluded that the structure of music modules in the brain is as illustrated in Figure 5.

Each box represents a processing component, some of which are shared with the language system, which is shown in grey. The arrows represent the pathways of information flow between the modules. A cognitive deficit in the music system might arise from the failure of one or more modules, or from the inhibition of one or more pathways between modules. In this model, any acoustic stimulus is initially processed in one module and then passed to the modules concerned with speech, music and environmental sounds.

Each of these modules then extracts the information to which it can respond. Musical emotions: functions, origins, evolution. Physics of life reviews. Psychology, Computer Science. View 9 excerpts, cites background. This article explores certain similarity relationships in music Cone, ; Wiggins, from a cultural-evolutionary perspective, specifically the memetics of Dawkins and others Blackmore, ; … Expand.

The origins of music. What biological and cognitive forces have shaped humankind's musical behavior and the rich global repertoire of musical structures? What is music for, and why does every human culture have it? What … Expand. The study of ethnomusicology : twenty-nine issues and concepts.

Evolution of the Physiological and Neurological Capacities for Music. Cambridge Archaeological Journal. Neuropsychological and developmental studies suggest human musical ability has a deep evolutionary history; but we do not find evidence of the manufacture and use of instruments, with which musical … Expand.

View 2 excerpts, references background. A reappraisal of the anatomical basis for speech in Middle Palaeolithic hominids. American journal of physical anthropology.

The consequences of talking to strangers: Evolutionary corollaries of socio-cultural influences on linguistic form.

We explore the proposal that the linguistic forms and structures employed by our earliest language-using ancestors might have been significantly different from those observed in the languages we are … Expand.

View 1 excerpt, references background. Nine professional musicians were instructed to perform short melodies using various instruments - the violin, electric guitar, flute, and singing voice - so as to communicate specific emotional … Expand. Thus Mithen arrived at the wildly ambitious project that unfolds in this book: an exploration of music as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species.

Music is the language of emotion, common wisdom tells us. In The Singing Neanderthals , Mithen introduces us to the science that might support such popular notions. With equal parts scientific rigor and charm, he marshals current evidence about social organization, tool and weapon technologies, hunting and scavenging strategies, habits and brain capacity of all our hominid ancestors, from australopithecines to Homo erectus , Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals to Homo sapiens —and comes up with a scenario for a shared musical and linguistic heritage.