Music’s evolutionary origin is established because it is present across all humans(meeting the biologists’ criterion of being widespread in a species); it has been around along time (refuting the notion that it is merely audio cheesecake); it involves specialized brain structures, including dedicated memory systems that can remain functional whenother memory systems fail (when a physical brain system develops across all humans,we assume that it has an evolutionary basis); and it is analogous to music making in other species. Rhythmic sequences optimally excite recurrent neural networks in mammalian brains, including feedback loops among the motor cortex, the cerebellum, and the frontalregions. Tonal systems, pitch transitions, and chords scaffold on certain properties of theauditory system that were themselves products of the physical world, of the inherentnature of vibrating objects. Our auditory system develops in ways that play on the relation between scales and the overtone series.
