Awe

We imagine emotion-specific actions: Overy, Katie, and Istvan Molnar-Szakacs. “Being Together in Time: Musical Experience and the Mirror Neuron System.” Music Perception 26, no. 5 (2009): 489–504. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2009.26.5.489.

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the power of sacred music: Beck, Guy L. Sacred Sound: Experiencing Music in World Religions. Waterloo, CAN: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006. This book provides a superb scholarly account of the sacred sounds in different religions.

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the provenance of the music: Bellah, Robert. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

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humans walked out of Africa: Morley, Iain. The Prehistory of Music: Human Evolution, Archaeology, and the Origins of Musicality. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013. Wallin, Nils L., Bjorn Merker, and Steven Brown. The Origins of Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

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Our most basic social interactions

: Tomlinson, Gary. A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity. New York: Zone Books, 2015. In this fascinating and complex book, Tomlinson proposes that music emerged as hominids created the Acheulean biface hand axe some 1.8 million years ago in East Africa, a tool that was vital to hunting, carving carcasses, digging, cutting wood, and defense. Archaeological evidence reveals that the individual production of these axes required a sequence of six to eight specific physical actions. Our hominid predecessors likely made these axes in groups, synchronizing their bodily actions through gesture and sound. Associations between sounds—grunts, groans, and even oohs and aahs at a truly symmetrical axe and whoas upon seeing others’ efforts—and specific outcomes in the knapping of the stone into an axe were common. From this, Tomlinson suggests, tool makers learned the basic cognitive architecture of music: that different sounds signify different actions and different outcomes in the world, and that variations in sounds fit within a larger system of people making sounds together.

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Music became a medium: This is the central thesis of neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin’s writing about music. Levitin, Daniel. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. New York: Penguin Press, 2013. For a recent assessment of this hypothesis, see: Savage, Patrick, Psyche Loui, Bronwyn Tarr, Adena Schachner, Luke Glowacki, Steven Mithen, and W. Fitch. “Music as a Coevolved System for Social Bonding.”

Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44 (2021): 1–42. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X20000333.

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From the age of one: Levitin, Daniel J., J. A. Grahn, and J. London. “The Psychology of Music: Rhythm and Movement.” Annual Reviews in Psychology 69 (2018): 51–75.

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In one illustrative study: Cameron, D. J., J. Bentley, and Jessica A. Grahn. “Cross-Cultural Influences on Rhythm Processing: Reproduction, Discrimination, and Beat Tapping.” Frontiers in Psychology

6 (2015): 366. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00366.

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And when strangers tap: Valdesolo, Piercarlo, and David DeSteno. “Synchrony and the Social Tuning of Compassion.” Emotion 11 (2011): 262–66.

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Listening to music that brings: Fukui, Hajime, and Kumiko Toyoshima. “Chill-Inducing Music Enhances Altruism in Humans.” Frontiers in Psychology 5 (2014): 1215. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01215.

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