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Coevolution Defined: Music and Words Influencing Each Other
Coevolution occurs in the same species when two traits influence each other's evolution, as with music and language. (Coevolution also occurs between species.)
Music could have evolved from speech, or speech from music, or, more likely, both speech and music could have co-evolved, sharing a common ancestor that had some characteristics of speech, some of music. In early humans, the music-language precursor, termed “musilanguage” by the neuroscientist Steven Brown, would have conveyed referential meaning (i.e., information) and also emotional meaning, using discrete pitch levels and expressive phrasing. Eventually, the musilanguage precursor would have split into two specialties:
- A specialty for conveying mainly referential meaning symbolically, (language), initially by expressive phrasing, and later using a vocabulary of words
- A specialty for conveying emotional meaning, mainly without symbolic meaning (music), via discrete pitch levels
Music and language likely co-evolved, and therefore interacted. So crossover occurred, as evidenced in songs with lyrics—“verbal song.” Today, there’s a continuum:
