36 Spirituality Studies 9-2 Fall 2023 4 Why Singing? Origins, History, and Metaphysics of Voice 4.1 From the Ancestors: Was There Singing in the Beginning? Musicality, like language, is a universal human trait that leads us to recognize and attempt to explain the value of music in our evolution and development. The extraordinary diversity of human activities that form part of music is evidence that musical practices have accompanied our species since its beginnings. As far back as our historical records go, the various cultures we know of have used aural modalities as part of their life experience (Flaubert 2017, 74). Although there is no clear consensus today on how or why humans developed the ability to create and understand music, the discovery of the importance of sound in prehistoric and ancient cultures has benefited from recent research within neuroscience, cognitive studies, and evolutionary psychology. These studies have also served as a reference for new disciplines such as musical archaeology and archaeoacoustics (Pasalodos et al. 2021, 17). Scientific theories on the origin of music date back to the 18th century with Rousseau and continued during the 19th century with evolutionary anthropologists such as Herbert Spencer or Charles Darwin himself. The former two point to the common origin – and this is the most relevant for our purposes – of music and speech: through the natural capacity of the human voice, a proto-language is created that is closely connected to emotions, which are an extension of natural psychological phenomena. For Darwin, on the other hand, music predates language itself; he understands it as sounds involved in the mating courtship of certain animal species and forms part of the process of sexual selection in which individuals with greater vocal ability have greater reproductive success. Currently, there are two basic currents in theories about the origin of music: structural models and functional models. The controversy arises from two different approaches: those who consider that music is a secondary product of other mental faculties developed by the brain and, on the contrary, those who defend that its existence responds to evolutionary reasons (Pasalodos 2020, 5). In any case, it is recognized that musicality has an undoubted adaptive advantage, and many researchers argue for a common origin of music and speech as a mixed form of communication, taking into account that the areas of the brain activated by music overlap with those dedicated to language. Therefore, it is suggested that both functions either developed in parallel, or that there was a precursor form of both that Steve Brown called musilanguage and that many other authors have followed suit (Rubia Vila 2018, 36). According to Brown, the differentiation of both phenomena would occur due to progressive and reciprocal specialization: language would emphasize the transmission of information and music would privilege emotional expression (Brown 1999, 274). Although the latter possibility has been contested by other scholars, a consensus is reached when the majority affirm that music has accompanied our species from its beginnings, and that the musical traditions of early prehistoric times already presented many of the cultural behaviors that also exist in historical and contemporary practices studied by ethnomusicology, anthropology, and sociology. These fields of knowledge emphasize the context in which sound is produced and understand it as “an activity of human beings involving sound, the purpose of which is to facilitate and enhance our connections to our environment. ‘Environment’ here is intended to be inclusive of both natural/physical and social realms” (Golden 2017, 32). Music thus becomes a means of transcending the ordinary in the way we express ourselves, and convincingly suggests that sound can powerfully influence not only oneself or others, but the environment, as understood in its broadest sense, reaching the spiritual and transcendent. Ethnomusicology has investigated these aspects widely and has highlighted the important role that music would have played in proto-rituals or rituals, in which it would be used to interact with and summon supernatural entities (Merriam 1964; Blacking 1973; Seeger 1987; Nettl 2005). In many cultures, conceptions of music – which, as we have said, would be mainly singing – are to some extent inseparable from conceptions of ritual and religion as understood in a broad sense (from its Latin etymology, religare, “connection” with the transcendent). Music is conceived as a means for transforming the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, between the natural and the supernatural; it favors trance and increases the experience of the sacred [8]. Along those boundaries that border on the trans-spiritual or transcendence, how music is interpreted and perceived can serve as a perfect medium for conveying symbolic associations, because combining them does not involve a fixed meaning, yet it has the potential to stimulate emotional reactions. This power of the non-denoting meaning of the human voice is confirmed if we consider that initially all music is born as
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