Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archeology, anthropology, biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience into a unified framework that accounts for the biological and cultural evolution of music. We argue that the evolution of musicality involves gene–culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors that initially arose and spread as cultural inventions had feedback effects on biological evolution because of their impact on social bonding. We emphasize the deep links between production, perception, prediction, and social reward arising from repetition, synchronization, and harmonization of rhythms and pitches, and summarize empirical evidence for these links at the levels of brain networks, physiological mechanisms, and behaviors across cultures and across species. Finally, we address potential criticisms and make testable predictions for future research, including neurobiological bases of musicality and relationships between human music, language, animal song, and other domains. The music and social bonding hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music.

中文翻译：

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音乐作为社会联系的共同进化系统

人类为什么要创作音乐？音乐性进化的理论主要关注音乐对特定适应性环境的价值，例如配偶选择、父母照顾、联盟信号和群体凝聚力。综合和扩展先前的建议，我们认为社会联系是统一所有这些理论的总体功能，并且音乐性使社会联系比祖先灵长类社会中的梳理和其他联系机制更大规模。我们将来自考古学、人类学、生物学、音乐学、心理学和神经科学的跨学科证据整合到一个统一的框架中，以解释音乐的生物和文化演变。我们认为音乐性的进化涉及基因-文化的共同进化，通过这种方式，最初作为文化发明出现和传播的原始音乐行为对生物进化产生了反馈效应，因为它们对社会联系产生了影响。我们强调节奏和音高的重复、同步和协调所产生的生产、感知、预测和社会奖励之间的深层联系，并总结了这些联系在大脑网络、生理机制和跨文化和行为水平上的经验证据。跨物种。最后，我们解决了潜在的批评并为未来的研究做出了可测试的预测，包括音乐性的神经生物学基础以及人类音乐、语言、动物歌曲和其他领域之间的关系。