One can, for instance, have respect and admiration for cinematographers, even though there was no cinematography in the environment of our evolutionary adaptation. Although such a coupling between music’s status and its origins may seem natural, there is in fact no logical connection between the two. On this view, which might be seen as an instantiation of the naturalistic fallacy ( Moore, 1903), music is perceived as valuable and worthwhile only to the extent that it is innate, inevitable, and the product of natural selection, and as less valuable to the extent that it is “merely” an acquired skill. It is not uncommon for lay people to see the status and prestige of music as being intimately tied to questions about music’s ontogenetic and phylogenetic origins. What is at stakeīefore considering criteria for how we might identify whether musicality is an instinct in a strong or weak sense, it is worth considering what is at stake or, more precisely, what is not at stake. Might be better understood as a product of skill learning, akin to other complex skills, such as efficiently swinging a golf club or playing chess. As the primary intent of the current article is to consider the developmental and evolutionary psychology of what draws humans to music rather than any particular musical tradition, I will sometimes use the word musicality, per a distinction stressed by Honing (2011), to refer to the act of creating, listening to, and enjoying music, rather than music, in the hope that some of my conclusions will extend beyond any particular genre or tradition of music. The point of this article is to evaluate the plausibility that music might be an instinct in this latter, stronger sense, and to compare that possibility with an alternative hypothesis: the notion that musicality 1 1Ī second question, equally fraught, but not addressed here, is what is meant by music per se, where notions of music so clearly vary across cultures. On this latter view, music is not just one arbitrary instantiation of a general capacity for acquiring culture but rather a specific basket of innately wired mechanisms. On the other hand, one might take the phrase music instinct in more forceful fashion, with equal weight on the words music and instinct, such that human beings were putatively endowed innately with a capacity to understand music, a desire to listen to it, and perhaps even an inborn ability to create it. The weakest possible meaning that we might assign to the phrase music instinct would be one in which all the force is on the word instinct rather than music, in which human beings would be endowed with a general-purpose instinct that allows them to acquire culture, with music being just one among many different manifestations of acquirable culture.

There are a variety of meanings that “music instinct” might hold, both weak and strong.

What would it mean for human beings to possess a music instinct? And how could we tell? In recent years, the phrase “music instinct” has become exceptionally common currency, used as the title of a television documentary ( Mannes, 2009), a popular book on music ( Ball, 2010), and an academic journal article ( Mithen, 2009).

Musicality who you are