Is Singing an Evolutionary Accident or a Critical Way to Connect?

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2024

⏱️ 25 minutes

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Summary

Scientific American associate news editor and music enthusiast Allison Parshall takes Science Quickly through what we know about how singing came to be. Scientists aren’t sure why humans evolved to sing, but commonalities in traditional music offer clues to how the practice evolved. Neuroscience shows us where speech and singing live in the brain and what information the forms hold. And an upcoming experiment will look into how singing might make us more connected to one another. Recommended reading: New Folk Song Analysis Finds Similarities around the World How Artificial Intelligence Helped Write This Award-Winning Song E-mail us at sciencequickly@sciam.com if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman with guest Allison Parshall. Our show is edited by Madison Goldberg with fact-checking by Marielle Issa, Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:30.1	What is it that turns speech into song? And why did humans start carrying tunes in the first
0:36.4	place? Those are questions that scientists are
0:39.4	still puzzling out, but some recent studies offer a few clues. For Scientific American Science
0:45.1	quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm joined today by Associate News editor Alison Partial to learn more
0:50.7	about the latest research on folk music.
0:59.1	Alison, thanks for coming back on the pod.
1:00.3	Always a pleasure to have you.
1:01.3	Thanks for having me.
1:04.6	So I hear we're going to talk about music today.
1:06.1	We are going to talk about music.
1:07.2	My favorite topic.
1:08.8	I think your favorite topic, too.
1:10.2	I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth.
1:10.7	Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess I would love to know if you have a favorite folk song.
	...

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