Musical Expression and Sexual Selection

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Evolutionary Psychology of Human mind
Human music and Nature
Sexual selection in context with the cultural aspect of Human nature
Music, senses, and sexual appeal
Musical Significance to mating – another perspective
Sexes with distinctive physical features
Works Cited

Introduction

Darwin, who is called ‘the prophet of the evolutionary world,’ first presented his idea in 1900 that music provides the utmost opportunity for humans to select their own mates. By music, Darwin meant the sweet ‘birds songs’ and melodious tunes of other bird-like creatures, while by ‘sexual selection Darwin meant that music has biological significance to attract the opposite sex for reproduction. Later, Howell agreed with Darwinian thought and constructed a view of the social reality that seemed compatible with the new principles of evolution (Bender, 1996, p. 34). Darwin categorized sexual selection on the basis of two aspects, ‘aggressive rivalry’ and ‘mate choice.’ Since our research focuses upon mate selection, we will discuss it in context with the factors affecting human evolution.

The human mind possesses the capabilities to generate music and being influenced by music. Since he inherently possesses the capabilities to be receptive to various musical tones, musical voices, and different rhythms so with the passage of time, he has related music with language and communication. Wallace argued that it could not have evolved by means of natural selection. However, we would later negate this perception by comparing it with Darwin’s.

Evolutionary Psychology of Human mind

It is through the advent of evolutionary psychology that we are able to describe ‘human nature’ in context with the cognitive and emotional mechanisms of the contemporary human mind. This is also through understanding how such mechanisms evolved via natural and sexual selection by musical evolution. This notion is supported by three basic principles. First, music has let us understand that this approach is essentially cognitive in that it attempts to principally understand how human cognition and emotion have evolved. Second, the human mind is viewed as a sharp cognitive instrument (as it possesses both goodness and evilness in it) rather than as a general problem solver. Third, it is through the musical selection that we are able to grasp the evolutionary changes since earth’s existence which is historical. It attempts to understand the selection forces that rendered particular mental modules functional within an environment that existed long ago (Sterelny & Fitness, 2003, p. 72).

Like evolutionary psychology, the key focus of social psychology is on the human social mind, and in particular, how cognition and emotion interact with behavior, both within individuals and across individuals when they interact. Of course, interaction requires a particular language and a communication mode. In the study of intimate relationships, social psychologists study the structure and functions of the intimate relationship mind and seek to model and explain how cognition, emotion, and behavior play out in terms of the phenomena of intimate relationships of mate selection. Now, the main concern is the notion of what the real criteria of emerging emotions and feelings are? Just imagine a mute environment. Where would be the feelings if the earth gets mute and silent?

Human music and Nature

In order to relate human nature with music and in order to relate human sexuality with musical senses, we have to dig music at the ground root level. Theorists, in order to define music’s importance, typically capture music’s technical characteristics or music’s constitutive properties of sounds in their rhythmic and dynamic combinations. If we distinguish the concept of the ‘musical’ from that of the ‘non-musical,’ then we can claim that the non-musical plays no role in understanding human personality. Now, if we do not consider explaining musical ‘technical’ significance with that of human nature and do not consider music’s ‘technicality,’ we would see that human characteristics are incomplete without sounds. Sounds generate feelings, feelings, in turn, awake senses, senses to distinguish between good and bad sounds, low and harsh sounds. These feelings, in turn, awake our organs. For example, a romantic song awakes romance in an individual. A violent song might awake ‘sexual appeal’ in a person or might lead that individual towards motivation in his work. That means that music is capable of generating any sense in an individual, which varies from person to person. Therefore, human expressions are dependant one way or the other upon music, either in the form of voice or language.

Traditional philosophical distinctions help capture the relation in which ‘musical’ properties are related as contingent to essential, as extrinsic to intrinsic, as relational to monadic, as shared to unique when it comes to expressing oneself. (Goehr, 1998, p. 10) But though comparison with these distinctions helps capture the uneven or lopsided relation in which the ‘musical’ has stood, we can evaluate the focality of music in the form of vocal expression, but we are simply unable to explain it. Such explanation fails to capture the reality of human existence, which does not suggest the feel of how this world would have survived in the absence of sounds and voices.

Human beings use language (whose meanings are arbitrary, relational, and conventional); they elaborate cultural systems of meaning and complex institutions; they relate to their environment, not by tooth and claw, but through the use of tools and in various forms of social labor. Such human reliance on culture indicates the ability to distinguish and select music so as to ease life through utilizing features of human existence through a basic biological substratum (Lancaster, 2003, p. 203).

Sexual selection in context with the cultural aspect of Human nature

Modern biology is the assumption that the Darwinian process of sexual selection accounts for all aspects of the adaptation of an organism to a particular way of life in a particular environment. Research tells us that ‘sexual’ selection is a child of ‘natural selection because natural selection is a system of corrective feefavorshat that favors those individuals that most closely approximate some best available organization for their ecological niche., For Darwin this was a way of explaining the great diversity of organisms that inhabit the Earth. Biologists today use ‘musical evidence’ more often to explain the great generation-to-generation stability of a species’ characteristics or the near absence of evolution. They assume that an organism is already close to some maximum achievable level of adaptation, and on this basis, they attempt to predict features not yet known (Williams, 1992, p. 38).

In order to prove the relationship of sexual and natural selection, we consider Darwin’s theology that ‘Natural selection is dependant upon and must react to physical entities that vary inaptitude for reproduction, either because the physical entities vary in accordance with reproductive organs or it is the only resource of reproduction.’ That clearly indicates that nature and sex are interlinked, and by the word ‘physical entities,’ physical features of humans are considered (That could also include sexual organs), (Williams, 1992, p. 38). Whenever these conditions are found, there will be natural selection, and of course, nature suggests and requires sex to be a hereditary feature. Wherever they are found to a great degree: inheritance strong enough, differences in fitness great enough, competing alternatives numerous enough, selection may produce noteworthy cumulative effects.

The sense of ‘human reproduction is the intersection of two essentialisms, cultural feminism, and socio-biology that marks a certain double irony or contradiction therein. On the one hand, feminism conceived in opposition to the status quo is readily appropriated by the machinery of mass representation; they quickly become part of the dominant culture insofar as essentialist notions of gender and sexuality. On the other hand, reductive ideas like socio-biology have conceived full tilt against the current of historical happenings, nonetheless participate in the revaluation of cultural values; they register the heave and shove of social struggles and are thereby open to the effects of history (Lancaster, 2003, p. 147). Today, representations of nature are dealt with in the same manner as they used to deal in the past times; we live in the same environment enclosed in the same culture. Even our values are the same. Man, in the beginning, was only concerned about feelings like thirst, hunger, and sex. Today’s man primary concerns are the same. What has changed is our perception, our ability to sort things out. That means the sexual selection is there!

Music, senses, and sexual appeal

According to Frederick Turner (1992), “Our nakedness or hairlessness is what our sexual selection has let us in ritual courtship.” This reveals the full beauty of one’s own and another’s primary and secondary sexual organs. Music has not only contributed to sexual selection, thereby arising the sense of sexual appeal, it has also contributed to consider and understand the mating position from mounting to face-to-face (Lancaster, 2003, p. 41).

Even those civilizations that consider ‘cultural music’ as a form of identification possess sexuality in their music which they often pay on specific occasions like marriage ceremonies, festivals, etc. Naturally, there is no lack of theories about the origin of music. Charles Darwin attributed the song to the imitation of animal cries in the mating season. Against this, it is to be noted that while it is true the imitation of animal cries plays a big part in the oldest civilizations known to us, love songs are very rare and usually mythological rather than erotic in character. Similarly, erotic songs infuse within individuals a sense of ‘gender sexuality and arousal, which is different in context with different sexual organs. For example, in females, the sense of feminism arises, whereas males are subjected to physical ‘arousal.’

Rousseau, Herder, and Spencer argued that speaking with a raised voice was the beginning of the song, and a kind of ‘speech song’ or chant-like recitative is true to be found in many primitive cultures. Whether this style is derived from speech seems very doubtful, however, in view of the many nonsense syllables (without verbal significance) which form the ‘text’ of these songs. Wallaschek stresses the importance of rhythm in the origin of music. Buecher even traces its beginnings to occupational rhythms, overlooking the fact that occupational songs belong to a very late stage of cultural history (Wellesz, 1957, p. 6).

According to Father W. Schmidt and Carl, Stumpf music arose, like speech, from the need to give signals by sound. A loud cry led to lingering on a note of definite pitch. Keeping in mind this theory, Stumpf initiated his theory of consonance: if the loud cry is uttered simultaneously by men and women in such a manner that it sounded in two different pitches, the resultant would be ditones. However, preference being necessarily given to octaves, fifths, and fourths owing to their high degree of blending. If such sounds were then sung successively, instead of together, an interval resulted, and its progressive breaking up into smaller parts led to the formation of melody. In Stumpf’s view, the real step towards the development of music was the breaking up of the original tone into successive notes and the transposition of ‘cry’ notes and musical motives. This theory conflicts, however, with the fact that in many primitive cultures, the motives are often made up of very small intervals, and motive-transpositions usually occur at very close intervals (Wellesz, 1957, p. 6). Whatever be the primitive culture, sounds act as the gateway of music, which in turn molds the individual towards feelings.

Although we must reject the hypothesis that speech is protomorphic music, it is still possible to speculate whether the very ancient ‘sound languages may not represent the common source of both speech and music. In many languages, the meaning of a syllable depends on the pitch at which it is uttered. Thus we can say that language itself is musical. If it is sung, music merely gives a more arioso effect to the melodic speech curves already determined by etymology; it merely strengthens the existing musical element.

It is, of course, possible that the whole language is merely a sort of leveled-down music, but it is more likely that the sound language is the older element from which developed both speech and song, speech striving towards free rhythm and music towards a more regulated one. The greatest difficulty in the way of this new theory is that at present, we know too little about the languages of the so-called primitive cultures. It is true that various pygmy races display the elements of ‘sound languages,’ but so far, only a small number of examples have been collected. In this context, if we consider African Ewe languages and Chinese songs, we would see that such marked agreement of musical and speech sounds appear to support the theory of the common origin of music and speech.

In music, there emerge very quickly hard-and-fast, conventional melodic forms which by reason of their indeterminate significance can easily become vehicles of the most varied subjective feelings. So the objective formula is generally recognized and accepted, combine quickly and easily with the subjective feelings of the singer. In this way, music has a unifying effect on human society. Melody liberates and gives objective form to feelings that, to begin with, were amorphous, ultra-subjective, or exaggerated, and the best instance and the best occasion of showing exaggeration is none other than ‘sexual selection’ and mating.

Singing allows innumerable repetitions of the same words, repetitions which, apart from magical utterances, seem meaningless or clumsy in ordinary speech; it also enables things to be said or hinted at which it would be difficult to express in sober speech. To the uninitiated, the words of such songs are for the most part completely unintelligible; but the aboriginal knows exactly what the few, apparently quite disconnected words mean in association with a particular melody. In some way or other, music throws a neutralizing veil over that which is individual and realistic, giving it the appearance of something objective and universally valid or typical, without prejudicing its subjective emotional value. It is easier to sing a love song than to speak a declaration of love (Wellesz, 1957, p. 8).

Musical Significance to mating – another perspective

With the passage of human evolution, time has generated many differences except for the ‘primary needs and goals, which are the same of each class (Food, housing, clothing, and sex). Musical preferences are also different with reference to the social needs of dating and mating. Wealthy people from higher social classes are likely to be viewed as more attractive dating partners and potential spouses than those from lower classes (Whyte, 1990, p. 70).

Sexes with distinctive physical features

Most biologists and psychologists agree that female and male orgasms are fundamentally different in at least some respects. This difference seems to stem from the plumbing, both anatomical and physiological: males have a penis, which is where both sperm and orgasm arise. Sexual pleasure is centered on the clitoris, which may or may not is stimulated during intercourse. The clitoris and penis derive during embryonic development from the same tissue, which is then modified to produce the sex organs of a boy or girl.

On the path of discovering sexual facts, some of the blame can be laid at the feet of Sigmund Freud, who declared that women’s orgasms that centered on the clitoris were infantile and represented an immature stage of development; only orgasms achieved via penis-in-vagina intercourse, with no additional messing around in private parts by other appendages, were considered worthy of a healthy woman. This famous pronouncement led to feelings of inferiority or pathology in many women whom we would now count as perfectly normal in their sexual responses (Zuk, 2002, p. 140).

The evolutionary significance of the human female orgasm has received quite a bit of attention over the last decade and a half. Several scientists mused on ways in which female orgasm might help those women experiencing it to achieve higher reproductive success, either currently or in our evolutionary history. But two considerations are important here. First, before examining the adaptive significance of a trait, we need to determine whether the trait is an adaptation at all. Zuk (2002) takes, in this case, the example of a nose. In a classic paper on the pitfalls of wanton application of the theory of natural selection to many traits, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould and the geneticist Richard Lewontin pointed out that although human noses are shaped in a perfect way to support spectacles, still no one would believe that noses have evolved because of selection for that function. The nose is not an adaptation for holding up glasses, and it would be absurd to look at different people’s noses to see which of them represents the organ best suited for the task and conclude that such individuals have been shaped, so to speak, by natural selection (Zuk, 2002, p. 142).

Similar is the case with a sexual selection which is seen differently in different cultures. For example, the concept of dating and mating in European countries is not considered bad before marriage, but the same concept is prohibited in Eastern and Arabic cultures. So, irrespective of the fact that how mate selection is made, sexual intercourse is the same everywhere. In every part of the world, sexual intercourse follows the same process and same procedure. Now comes a very interesting point that would bring the research to a full stop. Forget about the musical significance in sexual selection. During the mating process, sounds occurrence is natural, and sounds, as mentioned above, are the form of music. Whether human voices or sounds of Mother Nature, birds’ songs or a lion roar all are one way or the other associated with various pitches of music.

To get along with the notion that music effects sexual selection, we cannot go back in time and view the ancestral form of most traits, it is often difficult to know whether any particular trait is an adaptation or whether, like the bridge of the nose, it was co-opted for a different use much later in its history. However one thing for which we are sure is that music is still in evolution with the same process of ‘sexual selection’.

Works Cited

Bender Bert, (1996) The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871-1926: University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia.
Frederick Turner, “Biology and Beauty” In: Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 406–21, 413
Goehr Lydia, (1998) The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy the 1997 Ernest Bloch Lectures: Clarendon Press: Oxford.
Lancaster N. Roger, (2003) The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture: University of California Press: Berkeley, CA.
Sterelny Kim & Fitness Julie, (2003) From Mating to Mentality: Evaluating Evolutionary Psychology: Psychology Press: New York.
Wellesz Egon, (1957) Ancient and Oriental Music: Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Whyte Martin, King: Gruyter De Aldine, (1990) Dating, Mating and Marriage: New York.
Zuk Marlene, (2002) Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can’t Learn about Sex from Animals: University of California Press: Berkeley, CA.

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