Huhn oder Ei, Musik oder Sprache?

Neue biologische Deutungsmuster präsentierte ein Artikel im Boston Globe vom 9.11.03

Far from being abstract, music presents a strange analog to the patterns created by the sounds of speech. „Music, like the visual arts, is rooted in our experience of the natural world,“ says Schwartz. „It emulates our sound environment in the way that visual arts emulate the visual environment.“ In music we hear the echo of our basic sound-making instrument — the vocal tract. The explanation for human music is simpler still than Pythagoras’s mathematical equations: We like the sounds that are familiar to us — specifically, we like sounds that remind us of us.

This brings up some chicken-or-egg evolutionary questions. It may be that music imitates speech directly, the researchers say, in which case it would seem that language evolved first. It’s also conceivable that music came first and language is in effect an imitation of song — that in everyday speech we hit the musical notes we especially like.