Repository logo
 

The Human Faculty for Music: What's special about it?

cam.restrictionthesis_access_open
cam.supervisorCross, Ian
cam.thesis.fundingfalse
dc.contributor.authorBispham, John Christopher
dc.date.accessioned2018-10-31T15:43:38Z
dc.date.available2018-10-31T15:43:38Z
dc.date.issued2018-11-24
dc.date.submitted2018-03-14
dc.date.updated2018-10-29T19:10:09Z
dc.description.abstractAbstract (short version) This thesis presents a model of a narrow faculty for music - qualities that are at once universally present and operational in music across cultures whilst also being specific to our species and to the domain of music. The comparative approach taken focuses on core psychological and physiological capabilities that root and enable appropriate engagement with music rather than on their observable physical correlates. Configurations of musical pulse; musical tone; and musical motivation are described as providing a sustained attentional structure for managing personal experience and interpersonal interaction and as offering a continually renewing phenomenological link between the immediate past, the perceptual present and future expectation. Constituent parts of the narrow faculty for music are considered most fundamentally as a potentiating, quasi-architectural framework in which our most central affective and socio-intentional drives are afforded extended time, stability, and a degree of abstraction, intensity, focus and meaning. The author contends, therefore, that music's defining characteristics, specific functionalities and/or situated efficacies are not demarcated in broadly termed “musical” qualities such as melodic contour or rhythm or in those surprisingly elusive “objective facts” of musical structure. Rather they are solely the attentional/motivational frameworks which root our faculty to make and make sense of music. Our generic capacities for culture and the manifold uses of action, gesture, and sound to express and induce emotion; to regulate affective states; to create or reflect meaning; to signify; to ritualize; coordinate; communicate; interrelate; embody; entrain; and/or intentionalize, none of these is assessed as being intrinsically unique to music performance. Music is, instead, viewed as an ordered expression of human experience, behaviour, interaction, and vitality, all shaped, shared, given significance, and/or transformed in time. The relevance of this model to topical debates on music and evolution is discussed and the author contends that the perspective offered affords significant implications for our understanding of why music is evidently and remarkably effective in certain settings and in the pursuit of certain social, individual, and therapeutic goals.
dc.description.sponsorshipCambridge University Millennium Fund
dc.identifier.doi10.17863/CAM.31835
dc.identifier.urihttps://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/284459
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisher.collegeWolfson College
dc.publisher.departmentBiological Anthropology
dc.publisher.institutionUniversity of Cambridge
dc.rightsAll rights reserved
dc.rightsAll Rights Reserveden
dc.rights.urihttps://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/en
dc.subjectMusic
dc.subjectMusic Psychology
dc.subjectComparative Cognition
dc.subjectHuman Evolution
dc.subjectCommunication
dc.subjectAnthropology
dc.titleThe Human Faculty for Music: What's special about it?
dc.typeThesis
dc.type.qualificationlevelDoctoral
dc.type.qualificationnameDoctor of Philosophy (PhD)
dc.type.qualificationtitlePhD in Biological Anthropology

Files

Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Name:
PhD_P3.pdf
Size:
2.06 MB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Description:
Thesis
Licence
https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
License bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
license.txt
Size:
3.8 KB
Format:
Item-specific license agreed upon to submission