Why musical hierarchies?
Courtney B HiltonRie AsanoCedric BoeckxPublished in: The Behavioral and brain sciences (2021)
Credible signaling may have provided a selection pressure for producing and discriminating increasingly elaborate proto-musical signals. But, why evolve them to have hierarchical structure? We argue that the hierarchality of tonality and meter is a byproduct of domain-general mechanisms evolved for reasons other than credible signaling.
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