The vocal origin of musical scales: the Interval Spacing model

Toward a vocal model of music evolutionThe fields of music cognition and psychoacoustics argue that Western musical scales are "natural" because they are derived from the physics of sound via the harmonic series (Rameau, 1722;Helmholtz, 1877;Gill and Purves, 2009).Harmonicity-based theories of music are predicated on the idea that, because common Western scale-intervals are specifiable as simple harmonic ratios (e.g., 3:2 for the perfect fifth), they must be given to us by nature.We can conceive of this graphically as a linear grid that is populated along its length by a series of perfect ratios as discrete points (3:2, 4:3, 5:4, etc.), kind of like a number line.Given the fact that this grid is defined a priori by the physics of sound, all that is left for us to do is tune our instruments to these harmonic ratios and . . .voilà. . .we have music evolution!In reality, the elusive evolutionary mechanism that allows an acoustic process to generate the corresponding motor capacity to produce scaled pitches is never explained by proponents of the harmonicity theory.The theory is thus confined to the auditory system and its perceptual mechanisms.In addition, the theory is completely asocial, offering no explanation for the evolutionary functions of music in humans, not least for music's universal connection with group performance and the communication of emotion (Brown, 2000(Brown, , 2022)).An alternative to the accepted view that music is an accommodation to the perception of sound is our proposal that music is an accommodation to the production of vocallygenerated sounds during social communication, as enabled by novel evolutionary changes to the neuro-laryngeal system.While we are unable to state with certainty that the voice was the original musical instrument, we will base our theorizing on the plausible assumption that evolutionary changes to the vocal mechanism led to the emergence of both music and speech.In the case of speech, nobody would argue that surrogates for the voice (such as drums or whistles) evolved first, and yet virtually all theories of musical scales over the last 2,500 years have only ever considered musical instruments as the proper model of music's evolution, leading to the emergence of mathematical tuning theories of scales in all of the large civilizations over the last two millennia (Rameau, 1722; Helmholtz, 1877).In such theorizing, scales come first, and melodies are generated to accord with them, just as with modern-day symphony orchestras.In contrast, a vocal-motor account argues that melodic vocalizations evolved long before cultural evolution of precisely tunable musical instruments permitted theoretical formulations of scales.Instead of basing a theory of musical scales on a prescribed top-down grid of harmonic ratios, we need to start with the bottom-up mechanisms of vocal production, not least since the voice cannot be tuned a priori.These mechanisms are evolutionarily novel in the human lineage, and so they provide critical insights into why human music is such a distinct phenomenon in nature, and why similar melodic systems based on scaled pitches are so uncommon in other animals, despite similarities in their auditory organs.In the following sections, we will present a vocal model of the evolutionary origin of musical scales Frontiers in Psychology frontiersin.org

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