Dr. David Bashwiner

One thing that articulates us nicely is if you think about frogs and frogs are super vocal compared to other animals.

And they made it at nighttime.

And because it's night, they are distinguishing themselves like solely from the voice, at least from far enough away.

the thing that most dramatically changes to mark their different speciation is their vocalizations.

And then the other cool thing about this is like most animals, they often only have like a really simple noisemaker.

Like they can't make all these notes.

In a sense, it's kind of like with us too.

There's not that many notes we can sing.

But if you change the rhythm, the rhythm and the patterning, you can make your song really different from someone else's.

So like the way that you mark who you are

sonically vocally allows groups to separate from one another so if you think about like kids in high school as using music in that way first of all they're doing they're going out to the pond of the lek and and listening for music that's different from what their parents play right like that's really important yeah and then you're gonna if like with the goth thing like

It might be the clothes that attract you first and then you pay attention to how to, in a sense, like the arbitrary patterning of the sounds that the goth people are doing because you like those people you fit in because of clothes or for some other reason.

So in that sense, it could be totally arbitrary, but you're still going to...

say like, oh, I'm a goth person.

I listen to goth music.

And then the more you listen to goth music, that's becoming part of who you are.

So now you, Ali, as you walk around in the world, like whenever you hear one of those songs, you're like, it has a connection to you.

And you're like, oh, these are my people in some sense.

So yeah, it's possible for music to just try to be different in an arbitrary way, just so that that

separation of groups can happen.