Tasting a cheesecake in C Major: On musical pleasure and its adaptive biological function
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22201/cuaieed.16076079e.2023.24.3.4Keywords:
musical pleasure, biological adaptation of music, music cognition, musicology and biology, evolutionAbstract
Why do we like music? Humans enjoy listening to music, so much so that we flood our daily activities with this practice. This phenomenon seems to be something that spreads throughout the world, although not all cultures have the same conception of music. From an evolutionary perspective, music is so important to the species and has remained among us throughout all these thousands of years that we may think that it has some adaptive biological importance. However, certain authors suggest that music is nothing more than a by-product of evolution without a function relevant to the reproduction or survival of the species. According to them, it only serves to delight the ear, as if it were an auditory cheesecake (Pinker, 1997). Is not music transcendental for human life? That is what we will explore in this paper.
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