Dr. Jennifer Groh

And so that tends to feed on itself, too.

So that's another way that music could get into our, you know,

panoply of human characteristics without necessarily directly leading to something like being able to get more food.

Like the rhythm thing gives us more food.

People who are good at music might end up with more offspring than people who weren't good at music.

That would be the sort of general idea behind that part of the theory.

Yeah, we don't know.

And I think it's kind of interesting.

There are maybe sort of two, like I think with the songbird, they are signaling things like vigor and fitness and territoriality and things like that.

They're not conveying something symbolic, whereas the vocalizations in the primate tend to mean something specific.

Sometimes I wish I could have a time machine and I could go back and look at what happened in earlier stages of evolution and just kind of see, well, what is the lineage that... What is the sequence of events that led us to have language, that led us to have music?

Did it come from the same process as birds, songbirds, or did it come from a completely parallel process?

I mean, I think we do see that...

Evolution can arrive at similar characteristics through different means in different places in different times.

So, you know, it could be, you know, kind of convergent parallel process or it could be something different.

Yeah, and that's my experience too that if I know the first –

couple of words of a verse, I've got the rest of the verse.

It turns out that the story is more complicated and more interesting than that.

I got hooked on that particular study that I mentioned at the beginning.

So this was auditory signals in the superior colliculus being affected by the position of the eyes at the time the sound was presented.