There’s long been evidence that human brains have specific structures for perceiving, recognizing, and playing music, and even that people with “greater” abilities in these structures also have “greater” abilities in mathematics. If I remember correctly, we know this because certain people suffer from musicogenic epilepsy, experiencing varying degrees of epileptic seizures when listening to particular songs.
It’s not particularly surprising that are brains are specialized at this; our brains are specialized at a lot of other things that are important to people. But from an evolutionary perspective, why was music important for our survival? Specifically, why were people better able to process rhythm, rhyme, timbre and tone better able to survive? Perhaps these people were able to draw the attention of their peers, like a primitive form of fame, and this opened up other avenues for acquiring food and shelter. Or maybe they were better able to perceive the social meaning (and impending danger) of a competing tribes beats.
But where did all of this music come from? Presumably people needed to be able to perceive music before being able to play it. Or maybe the foundations of music perception, such as rhythm, were bootstrapped by other pattern matching perceptual systems, enabling people to mimic the rhythms with practice. I can see it now: the early homo sapien sitting at the edge of her cave entrance on a rock, waiting for the return of the hunting party. It’s pouring outside, and a lively pattern of drips drop down from the arch of the entrance, emerging from the orderly chaos of surface tension and gravity. Listening to this rhythm all afternoon, and hearing the pattern slow as the skies dried, that boar tooth in her hand must have become her mallet and the rock her marimba. I wonder what the hunting party thought when they returned home and she was teaching the kids how to tap stone. At least the kids were busy playing instead of whining about the lack of food.