How do you think? What is origin of our particular sensitivity to harmonious music?
The longer I live, in growing degree I am becoming positive (and still more optimistic) and believe in more natural origin of human attitudes toward beauty and goodness. Once I'd even suggested that also understandingand recognizing of music may be imprinted in ourgenes.
The understanding of music is not irrelevant to ethics. As well as to the culture as a whole, also. Symphonies' general pattern implemented ingenes? The genetic memory of this pattern we can hear in the symphony performed by crickets
(Have you ever heard the amazing cricketschirping slowed down?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqU5OMNL-7I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uanB6Qn8v5M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP5e7jrYBtY
https://youtu.be/WRDlP0b_iAY
Isn't it comparable with humans best symphonies?Maybe we have to change our understanding ofmusic, beauty and goodness, as attributed only toculture of human beings?When we were much much smaller mammals, sosmall that our pace of life was equal with thecricket life, we could hear these symphonieswhole our lifes generation after generation, as if we were spending most of our lifes in philharmony. This was alike music of the heavenly spheres all the time around us. It could not end in other way. So,we may have imprinted archetypes of symphony in our genetic memory, quite likely. We can enjoy these music again, when after dozens millions years we've managed to return to this hidden for our ears for dozens hundred thousand years music, as our best composers rediscovered it again for us during recent few centuries.
In a similar way not only notion of music, but also more general beauty or goodness, can be incorporated in the structure of our genes, as the creatures which possessed empathy and prefered more regular (than chaotic) patterns, simply were better prepared for survival. In such a way nature could create higher beings able to consider things beautiful and valuable, differentiating better from worse. However, isn't it so that the full expression of these natural features occurred when humans during evolution of their culture invented the names for good and evil, as well as for beauty and art?
Isn't it so that prehuman beings (and preculture beings we were at the beginning) could dimmly sense the difference? But only when the notions were invented and their designates were developed, humans created understanding of beauty and goodness. And is not it so than only while they fully developed these ideas, they entered reality as its part? I.e., did not humans created all the beauty and goodness of the world? As its beauty was hardly recognized as such before by any former beings?
Or did they recognized it but just could not express that recognision in other way than just by prefering beauty or good in images or behaviour of their partners and surrouding? In other words: May beauty or goodness be possible without beings understanding them as such?
Of course you may remain sceptical as in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFFtqEyfu_o
Notice, however, wrong assumption that difference of receiving sound depends on age (time of life) differences of species (and not linear dimensions of their hearing apparatus).
This question is connected with similar discussions already present on RG, and among the others the omne archivized in the attached file : (27) Do small babies understand the ethical and aesthetical categories_.pdf
as well as no longer available its predecessor
https://www.researchgate.net/post/May_music_be_implemented_in_our_gens_and_not_only_cultural_archetypes
While I love the idea of great symphonies as humankinds unintentional 'ode' to the 'primordial savannah', I think its wrong to view it as an explanation for a response to 'music'.
I suggest that if we describe music as a collection sounds that share some 'consistent' relationship, and observe that some organisms respond to 'music' in similar ways, while, not as poetical sounding as 'music in our genes', its much easier to support.
Its my opinion that this latter description is more beautiful than the first, however, because it shows that somehow, through out the epochs of change, their 'vibration sensing' systems respond to the input in a similar way to ours, suggesting that the basic 'outputs' of sound sensing hasn't needed to change very much since we 'split' from what ever common group we share. Which I like to think helps us to understand a little better, what being human actually means.
All of the tiny interactions of vibrating media 'press buttons' to make their brains squirt compounds that make them act similar to how we act when our brain is squirting compounds after having its 'buttons' pressed by similar vibrating media. So alike, but in us, its so much more.
the short version: Examples of shared biology increase our understanding of the impact of sapience in our selves, and the implied idea that its the 'smartness' that makes its music rather than 'bunch of sounds' is beautiful. ...to me
The inclination to be able to get a high education in music is genetic and located in our brain. The neuroscience of music is the scientific study of brain-based mechanisms involved in the cognitive processes underlying music such as listening, performing, composing, reading, writing, and ancillary activities. There is also a brain basis for musical aesthetics and musical emotion. I attach one of our music papers:
Your understanding of music goes back to the theory of mimesis. The problem of interpreting the phenomenon of music depends on where you draw the line between art and reality.
An important, but somewhat distracting, observation: if one were to find a genetic predisposition to music in some people and not in others, such a theory could become the basis of Nazism, racism, xenophobia in all its possible variations, and the corresponding potential for discrimination.
Plato theory of mimesis assume existence of some ideal natural patterns to which we can only approach closer as to the ideal “world of ideas”. But from his time we already know (after Popper) that the 3rd world of ideas is created by us. And that they exist in such an abundance in which we ever ever will create and describe such (though, some used to say about their rediscovery).
And what concerns Nazism, I didn't suppose that while highly valuating outstanding composers (who are genetically better prepared than me for musical creativity, due to better hearing - excluding Beethoven - and higher musical intelligence) I am becoming a Nazi?
Here I recommend:
Article Totalitaryzm
"Nazism - National Socialist ideology and political movement widespread in the Third Reich (1933-1945) after the seizure of power by Adolf Hitler. In theory and practice, based on racial hatred, in particular towards the Jewish people, negation of democratic standards in domestic politics and imperial, aggressive international politics."
There is a strong tendency in our "instincts" towards beauty. This tendency can be stronger or weaker (on a continuum) in different people with different tastes and talents and levels of emotional sensitivity. But unless one is not ill (for example, say, anhedonic), one would have such an attraction to beauty. And instincts stem from biological factors (genetic, epigenetic, god knows what else).
Of course the music taste and even our preferences for beauty in a more general sense are severely shaped by our personal experiences, cultures, social statuses, and many other factors.
But regardless of what we call beautiful and regardless of our standards and taste for beauty, the tendency toward beauty exists in us and is hard-wired in our brains (genetic and epigenetic).
Perhaps beauty plays a strong evolutionary role, and this is why it is hardwired in us. Because where beauty is, good things happen. Almost anything beautiful is connected to life, abundance, joy, sexual attraction (reproduction), etc.
Now the more difficult question is what makes music beautiful?
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