I have my own idea of why music is so important to our species.
It started out as a programming bug ("auditory cheesecake"): certain arrangements of sound hijack the brain's ability to recognize patterns and emotions in pitch of voice, creating an emotional response in the listener. The best musicians are those who are best at manipulating their listeners' emotions in this way. It's not hard to see how this made them more successful reproducers early on.
At this point people could have evolved to be better at resisting this sort of manipulation; however, this proved to be too high an evolutionary hurdle to overcome. Instead, the people who were most susceptible to this manipulation actually gained an advantage -- Since they were most likely to mate with musicians, their offspring were most likely to become the best musicians in the next generation!
Thus, a positive feedback loop was created where successive generations became more musically-talented and more susceptible to the effects of music.
If you find this hypothesis interesting, I highly suggest Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene. I think he calls this general phenomenon the "sexy male" hypothesis.
It started out as a programming bug ("auditory cheesecake"): certain arrangements of sound hijack the brain's ability to recognize patterns and emotions in pitch of voice, creating an emotional response in the listener. The best musicians are those who are best at manipulating their listeners' emotions in this way. It's not hard to see how this made them more successful reproducers early on.
At this point people could have evolved to be better at resisting this sort of manipulation; however, this proved to be too high an evolutionary hurdle to overcome. Instead, the people who were most susceptible to this manipulation actually gained an advantage -- Since they were most likely to mate with musicians, their offspring were most likely to become the best musicians in the next generation!
Thus, a positive feedback loop was created where successive generations became more musically-talented and more susceptible to the effects of music.
If you find this hypothesis interesting, I highly suggest Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene. I think he calls this general phenomenon the "sexy male" hypothesis.