Steven Mithen: The co-evolution of music and language
All are welcome to Aesthetic Seminar.
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Kasernen, building 1584, room 124. Langelandsgade 139, 8000 Aarhus C
Funded by the Unit for Song Studies & the research programme Arts, Aesthetics and Communities:
Steven Mithen: The co-evolution of music and language
Music and language have numerous similarities. They share the principle of compositionality, the use of a finite number of units to create phrases that are more than the sum of their parts and potentially infinite in number. Both can be expressed by the voice, by the body – as in singing and dancing – and in written form. They are typically undertaken as a form of communications between individuals and groups but can also be pursed alone. And yet, music and language are also profoundly different: words and spoken utterances have semantic meanings that are shared within a speech community; musical tones and phrases do not. Music may induce a shared emotional response but, unlike language, lacks any informational content. The overlaps between music and language have long suggested they have a shared evolutionary history. By drawing on my research published within The Singing Neanderthals (2007) and The Language Puzzle (2024), I will suggest music and language evolved from a single archaic, multi-purpose communication system and diverged at c. 1.5 million years ago when the first words emerged from what had been holistic ape-like calls. Those words provided the first towards language and liberating the remnant holistic calls to focus on the unique roles that music accomplishes today.
Bio
Steven Mithen is Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading, UK. He interests are with the evolution of language, music and mind, prehistoric hunter-gatherers, and the transition to farming economies. He has undertaken long term-field projects in southern Jordan, finding and excavating the early Neolithic site of Wadi Faynan 16, and in western Scotland where he has reconstructed Mesolithic settlement patterns. His two most recent books are Land of the Ilich (2021) and The Language Puzzle (2024).
Æstetisk Seminar E2024 er tilrettelagt af Christiane Særkjær og Jan Løhmann Stephensen, Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet.