Is Music A Form of Communication?
It is often said that music is a form of communication.
Given this assumption, one can reasonably ask:
However the evidence for music being a form of communication is not very convincing.
In practice music is not used pragmatically to communicate anything.
For example, people do not go to musical concerts in order to receive new important or useful information about something.
They go to concerts to be entertained, and to enjoy the feelings that music creates (and perhaps also to be impressed by the musical skills of the performers).
A pragmatic communication system can be identified as such by the way it is used in certain scenarios.
The simplest such scenario is where two individuals are trying to solve a problem together, where the solution to the problem is of mutual interest to both of them. The individuals will use a communication system to communicate information to each other about the nature of the problem, and about what might be done to solve it.
People routinely use spoken word-based language in such scenarios.
Nobody ever uses music as a system of communication in such a scenario. (One problem-solving scenario where people might play music to each other is where they are actually attempting to produce new music, however in that scenario music is the problem that they are trying to solve, and it is not a communication system in the sense of using music to "talk" about something else that isn't music.)
"Expression"
If music doesn't communicate, then what does it do?
People often talk about what music expresses.
"Expression" is a somewhat vague and abstract concept. It means something like "a thing which is a bit like communication, but which is not actually communication".
"Expression" is a weaker concept than "communication", because there is no objective way to measure what has been "expressed" by a system of expression.
The only way we can know what it is that music expresses is to listen to some music, and then search our inner feelings to find out what it was that the music was expressing.
With this slightly different statement about music, we can make a corresponding change to the question above:
The most popular answer to this question is that music expresses emotion.
Hypothesis: The ancestor of "expression" was "communication"
One plausible hypothesis to explain the existence of music as a system of expression, which "feels" like communication, but actually isn't, is to suppose that music evolved from an original prehistoric ancestral form that actually was a system of communication, and music then, somehow, evolved from being a system of communication to being a system of expression.
In its orginal form, this ancestor of music was used to pragmatically communicate information in various situations, including cooperative problem-solving scenarios.
I will call this hypothetical ancestral form of music Protomusic, because, as it happens, that is a general term used to refer to any proposed hypothetical ancestor of music that was not actually music.
If we assume this hypothesis to be the case, then we can conclude that prehistoric protomusic communicated the thing that modern music now expresses.
So if music expresses emotion, then we must conclude that protomusic communicated emotion.
However the concept of "communicating emotion" is somewhat problematic.
In particular, if we consider sentences in spoken language, it is not possible to utter a sentence that consists entirely of the description of a specific emotion.
For example, "Sad" is not a meaningful sentence.
In practice, words describing emotions in specific situations will be attached to two specific qualifications, which are:
- who is feeling the emotion, and,
- what the person is feeling the emotion about.
So we can't just say "Sad", but we can say "Jim is feeling sad", and this will generally be further qualified by an explanation of why Jim is feeling sad, for example "Jim is feeling sad because his girlfriend left him".
There is the further complication that music does not always unambiguously represent specific emotions. Sometimes all we can say is that there is an emotion, of some kind. So instead of "Sad", we would have the more abstract "Emotional". And a fully qualified version of that would then be, for example, "Jim is feeling emotional because his girlfriend left him.
Protomusic and the Evolution of Word-Based Language
An additional hypothesis about protomusic is that protomusic was a system of communication that evolved before the development of spoken word-based language.
This additional hypothesis can immediately explain why protomusic evolved from being a system of communication to being something that is not quite a system of communication – because when word-based language evolved it became so effective that it rendered the protomusical system of communication obsolete.
At the same time, although the evolution of word-based language was probably responsible for the un-evolution of protomusic as a system of communication, the earlier evolution of protomusic may have been the very thing that made it possible for word-based language to evolve at all.
That is, word-based language originally started to evolve as an incremental enhancement of the protomusical language, but eventually the word-based language developed a complexity and sophistication where the "musical" aspects of the protomusical language no longer provided any benefit, and protomusic may also have constrained spoken language in ways that were not helpful (imagine if everything you wanted to say had to be sung, and had to be emotional ...).
So eventually the protomusical language had to go.
Except somehow the protomusical system of communication did not fully disappear. Instead it turned into something else – a means of "expression".
That is, it turned into music.
Protomusic was like the mother that begat the child which was word-based language, but the word-based language grew up, and one day it ungratefully kicked its mother out of the house. Except actually the mother never fully left – she no longer lives in the house, but she still hangs out in the back garden.
The Abstract Meaning of Protomusic
I have explained above why the content of protomusic as a system of communication had to be something more than just "emotion", and that it would probably have included both an indication of who was feeling the emotion and what the emotion was about.
At the same time, we know that modern music does not communicate anything specific about the thing that is causing the supposed emotion.
So can consider to what extent and how the protomusical system of communication would have represented the "who" and the "what".
The "who" would simply have been the speaker of the protomusical utterance.
The "what" would not have been specified in any detail at all. Specifying details would require words, and words hadn't been invented yet. Also we know that musical emotion can relate to something that is specified in some way, but at the same time the music itself is not the one doing the specifying. So-called "pure music" is music that refuses to give us any hint at all about the thing that the music is "about".
However, I think there is one thing what protomusic did tell listeners about the thing that the musical emotion was about, and that related to timing, that is, when it was that the individual started feeling that emotion as a result of perceiving or discovering or realising whatever it was that caused them to feel the emotion.
In particular, I propose that protomusic was used to communicate that an emotion was being felt as the result of the individual perceiving or realising something, either right now, or very recently.
In other words, protomusic communicated the occurrence of revelation of information where that information had emotional significance, and it communicated that the relevation had happened at the time that it happened.
This communication was still lacking in specifics, but, the timing information would highlight to the listeners that possibly they could determine the nature of the thing that the emotion was about, for example by paying closer attention to something in the current environment. Or, if it was from a realisation based on less recently acquired information, the listeners could look for clues in actions or behaviour being initiated by the "speaking" individual in response to said realisation.
To put it another way, protomusic did not communicate the "what", but it did communcate a "when", and that information about "when" would give some clue to listeners as to what the "what" was, or at least it would motivate the listeners to pay attention to the current environment and the actions of the protomusical "speaker" to possibly find out what the "what" was.
The protomusic was telling the listeners about the existence of some information, recently revealed in some manner to the "speaker", where the importance of that information was indicated by the degree and nature of the emotion that it invoked in the speaker. And although the protomusic did not say anything about what the information actually was, it was telling the listeners that there was information to be had, if they made some independent effort of their own to discover what it was.
Under these hypotheses, this system of communication was very abstract, and we might wonder how such an abstract system of communication could be useful in practice. The usefulness of it as a system of communication probably depended on the lifestyle and social structures of the ancestral hominid species that employed it.
One consequence of the existence of such an abstract system of communication is that it would create immediate pressure to evolve mechanisms for including specific details in the protomusical utterances.
That is, words.
And it would not be necessary for modern-style language with grammar and sentences to appear de novo.
This is one of the problems of evolutionary linguistics – words must have evolved before grammar, but without grammar, how could words be used to construct meaningful utterances?
The hypothesis about protomusic provides a possible solution to this problem.
Before words evolved, abstract protomusical communication was just telling listeners that "there is information to be had". In this scenario, any sort of additional clue would have been useful. Words evolved as a way of supplying addition details about what the information was. Words did not have to fully explain the content of the information, but they gave the listeners important clues about what that information was.
Solving the Puzzle ...
We can think of protomusic as being something that created a puzzle every time it was "spoken".
An individual "speaks" a protomusic utterance, which says in effect "New information has been revealed to me which has emotional significance".
Any other individual who hears the utterance now has a puzzle to solve – what is the new information? What did the speaker perceive that caused them to acquire that new information? Is it something that just happened? Is it something that is still happening? Or is it just that the speaker was thinking about something?
Words initially evolved to provide clues to help solve these puzzles.
There would come a day when the words were assembled into full sentences using complex grammatical rules, and when that day came the protomusic was no longer necessary, because the sentences provided a full solution to the puzzle that the protomusical utterances would have posed.
But initially the words provided only a partial clue.
For example, following on from the example I gave above, Jim might speak a protomusical utterance that says "New information has been revealed to me which has emotional significance, which makes me feel sad". And this protomusical utterance would include a word or two, for example "girlfriend", or "left".
These words were not sufficient to tell the whole story, but they provided clues to any listeners trying to solve the puzzle of what the new emotionally significant information was that Jim was referring to in his protomusical utterance.
Eventually there would come a day when the words would be used to construct a full sentence such as "My girlfriend has left me", or even "My girlfriend left me, and now I'm feeling sad". When this day came, the protomusical component of the utterance was no longer necessary, because the sentence constructed from words provided full details of the information that Jim was speaking about.
And back to the present ...
The implication of these hypotheses is that protomusical communication had emotional content, but, protomusic did not communicate emotion per se.
The emotion was secondary to the primary content of protomusic, which was a statement that important new information had been (or was being) revealed to the speaker. The emotion was secondary because it qualified the importance of the new information, that is, if the information caused the speaker to feel strong emotion, then that information was necessarily important to the speaker, and it was therefore probably important to the listeners – if they could figure out for themselves what the information actually was.
It follows that if protomusic did not communicate emotion per se, then, correspondingly, music does not actually express emotion per se.
Because the thing that music expresses is the thing that protomusic communicated.
The implication is that music expresses the current or very recent revelation of emotionally significant information about something.
And that is the hypothesis that I have called the Revelation Hypothesis.