Tone-deaf occurs in four percent of the population, who can not hear a tone is false. Many of history's great personalities, such as President Theodore Roosevelt and the revolution leader Che Guevara, was considered to be tone-deaf without causing them any problems.
Peretz and colleagues showed for the first time in 2007 that there is a strong genetic component associated with the tone-deaf - and thus the music can be selective by evolution. The only question is what has been the driving force.
It is an issue that also occupied Darwin. He regarded music as one of the greatest mysteries, then "neither pleasure nor the ability to produce music is of the slightest benefit of man," he wrote in his book "The Descent of Man". Since then there have been no ideas of momentum. The American neurobiologist Steven Pinker has often been quoted for his statement, "music is ear cream", and he emphasizes what might be called the null hypothesis: that the music just the mind is a happy coincidence of other properties.
Music, for example, using the advantageous ability to convert pressure waves into nuanced sound and the brain's ability to organize language audio for rules and principles. The music arouses emotions that may have originated in common with other sounds of more biological relevance, as noise from children and animals.
Musicians have many partners
Null hypothesis is by no means unlikely, but there are other good suggestions. Some scientists - including Darwin - suggest that music may be a result of sexual selection. The music so to speak, is sexy, and that musicians are attractive.
One of the telling of sexual selection, in addition to numerous anecdotes about how easy rock stars attract sexual partners, is that the pursuit of music requires the use of several properties at once, and that a talented musician, therefore, on a primitive level exudes great capacity for survival. One weakness of the theory is that people of both sexes appreciate music played by both men and women. Another weakness is the study of infants, showing that music can be appreciated even long before sexual maturity.
Another widespread assumption of music as a "social glue", which has been able to strengthen people's cohesion in such wars, when the singing can improve the mood of exhausted soldiers, lodge and hope to instill courage battle. Or vice versa: function demoralizing and sinister for enemy troops.
The problem is that hypotheses are difficult to test reality. But good try, they risk becoming merely plausible ideas. The area where the researchers collected the most data is associated with a hypothesis that music has its origin in the spoken language. The theory builds on the obvious observation that both music and language are made up of separate sound elements (tones and phonemes (speech sounds)), which under rules are organized into complex structures. The ability to master both parts is dependent on how they can interpret the complex sound patterns that emerge over time.
A proponent is Dr Aniruddha Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, which together with Japanese colleagues demonstrated a relationship between language and how people are up-take musical patterns. It turns out that a series of varying tones, such as long-short-long-short-long-short, is perceived differently in Japan and Europe. The Japanese are a pattern of long-short, while the Europeans are a pattern of short-long.
The difference in what they are hanging under Patel together with the way language is structured. European languages have a short word in the content word, for example, "a book", while the Japanese are, conversely, "she wo" (book one).
Euphony is just pure biology
Another study has been made of nerve researcher Dale Purves at Duke University in North Carolina, USA. He argues that language is directly shaped what we find aesthetically in music. He wondered why a few frequencies of all the 20,000 which the human ear can perceive sound so harmonious.
With colleagues began Purves 2003 separate vowel sounds of words and found that the frequencies in which human speech marks a special force of discharge corresponds exactly to the frequencies you get when you play a scale on a piano (12 tones). Purves further examined the relationship between speech and music. He came in 2007 concluded that the combination of tones that we think sounds pleasant on the piano equivalent frequencies that define the vowel sounds in human speech, whether it's Swedish or Swahili.
Human speech starts when the air pressure past the vocal cords and causes them to vibrate at the basic frequencies, which are then shaped further by including the head resonance chamber. Vocal cords can be compared with the strings of a guitar, and the rest of the head acts as a guitar box.
It turns out that the energy-richest of the resonant frequencies are crucial for vowel sounds. In other words, the interaction between the pronunciation and the brain's interpretation has been through evolution led to a distribution of frequencies, which are suitable for human communication. "The implied conclusion is that the aesthetics of the music reduced to biological information," says Purves, well aware that this is not popular among musicians.
Although both Patel's and Purves observations are promising proves nothing, and they may be due to chance. With language as a basis for music, however, it becomes easier to try to explain what has driven development, where a more nuanced communication clearly would have given our ancestors enormous advantages in the fight for survival.
It may look like Patel and Purves is on track with the language hypothesis, but the answer need not be a theory, which is the right one. The answer may be more complex. Music is perhaps the only universal phenomenon in humans that have no obvious function that scientists can agree on.
There is no guarantee that you will ever understand the music and its origin, but perhaps it will inform the experiment one day to reveal our musical work's core, and identify those features that are unique to music.
