PUBLIC LECTURE: School of Music presents: Research Seminar Series - Nicholas Bannan

Music as the ‘missing link’: the evolutionary pathway from animal communication to language.

A growing consensus drawing on research in a wide variety of disciplines has over the last fifteen years or so argued the need to revisit Darwin’s conjecture of 1871 that language may be descended from an existing, musical medium of communication that developed from animal calls. This paper focuses especially on the aspects of human musical behaviour and language that have evolved in our species in relation to perceptual and productive capacities that respond to the properties of the Harmonic Series.