Emotional Origin of Music

 According to contemporary affective neuroscience, basic human emotions are protocols for survival and adaptation that we share with other higher apes and mammals [Panksepp, 1998]. Our basic emotions are processed in our brains in seven specific subcortical neural systems, although their interaction is mediated at the cortical level by other cognitive functions (attention, working memory, representation and planning of goals, etc.). As we all have experienced, there is only top down control of the emotions when the organism is not under stress [Panksepp, 1998]. Emotions are directly linked with the homeostasis of the individual and the social organism, for they deal with answers to vital problems, and in this sense, they are the result of successful  actions of survival which express what we call intelligence. Emotions are cognitive actions which follow very clear goals for the organism, so the separation between emotion and intelligence is basically a theological myth, for there is a process of continuous rationality among all living beings in increasing complexification. (I have treated this more extensively somewhere else[1])

   Emotions give the general semantics for human (and animal) communication, i.e. human language grew out of the social communication needed for the group homeostasis, and developed itself into ever more complex symbolical constructions which were useful answers to life problems. Theories of an emotional origin of language were already given by Epicenus, Lucretius, and in the modern world by Vico, Rousseau or Darwin, although their concept of emotion was not exactly the one that today uses neuroscience.

  Emotions gave also the condition of possibility for musical communication, and we can picture the origin of music as a complexification of human (emotional) communication through sound, gesture and dance which conveyed socially relevant information, maternal, sexual, hunting, etc., contributing to the development of the group identity when enacted in mythico-ritual axes. The progressive complexification of music runs parallel to the complexification of our emotions, in fact, music and poetry became the fundamental symbolical tools for the n-aryzation (making n-ary, using the mathematical terminology) of our basic animal emotions, defining the identities of the group and the individual.

For more on music and affective neuroscience see:

Blood, A.J., Zatorre, R.J., 2001. Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98, 11818_/11823.

Panksepp, Jaak, [1998]Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford University Press. New York 1998.

Panksepp, Jaak and Bernatzky, Günther. [2002]Emotional sounds and the brain: the neuro-affective foundations of musical appreciation. Behavioural Processes 60 (2002) 133_/155

---

[1] Oscar E. Muñoz. Mitopoética: la construcción simbólica de la identidad humana. Mandala Ediciones. Madrid. 2013. English translation of the first part Mythopoetics: Mythic Domain. Mandala Ediciones. Madrid. 2014. On line at: Mythopoetics Review.