Working group explores the evolution of musicality

Music has been a universal language across time, peoples, and geographies. We may clap, sing, play drums, or arrange symphonies to build social bonds or express emotions, and our ability to recognize a beat or share a common song ties us to our communities. But musicality is also fundamental to our human experience — it is a result of our biological evolution. For music to first arise, aspects of our biology — from our vocal chords to connections within our brains — had to evolve. Despite musicality’s connection to both culture and biology, studies on the evolution of music have rarely brought these topics together.

SFI External Professor Marco Buongiorno Nardelli (University of North Texas), a composer and computational physicist, along with Elizabeth Margulis (Princeton), a researcher on music perception and cognition, and evolutionary anthropologist Edward Hagen (Washington State University) hope to begin bridging that gap through an SFI working group, Music Evolution: from Biology to Artificial Intelligence, convening May 28–30, 2025. 

The working group, which will consist of researchers who focus on anthropology, physiology, neurology, and culture, seeks to address how biological, cultural, and musical evolution occurs in tandem and how music has evolved into cultural expression. 

For humans and other species, particularly other primates, musicality has served evolutionary purposes, including as an aid against predation. “Primate alarm calls not only warn other group members that a predator is near, they might also signal to the predator that it has been detected,” says Hagen. “Synchronized vocal signaling might further indicate that multiple individuals will attack or mob the predator if it does not withdraw.”

“One useful shift in the field has been toward thinking about the evolution of musicality — the capacity for music, rather than the evolution of music itself,” says Margulis. “This can help clarify that we’re trying to understand how humans came to possess certain abilities.” 

The connection between music and humanity can even be seen within an individual song, says Buongiorno Nardelli. “We can look at a piece of music from a structural point of view. The cultural environment, on the societal level, shapes the structure. This feedback loop across scales is very interesting.”

This working group is the next of a series of groups focusing on music within a larger context. Previous working groups covered aspects such as the mathematics, the structure, and the rituals associated with music.