According to the evaluativist theory of bodily pain, the overall phenomenology of a painful experience is explained by attributing to it two types of representational content—an indicative content that represents bodily damage or disturbance, and an evaluative content that represents that condition as bad for the subject. This paper considers whether evaluativism can offer a suitable explanation of aversive auditory phenomenology—the experience of awful noises—and argues that it can only do so by conceding that auditory evaluative content would be guilty (...) of widespread error. Defending such an error-theory, moreover, comes with several explanatory costs. (shrink)

We disagree with Juslin & Vll's (J&V's) thesis that music-evoked emotions are indistinguishable from other emotions in both their nature and underlying mechanisms and that music just induces some emotions more frequently than others. Empirical evidence suggests that frequency differences reflect the specific nature of music-evoked emotions: aesthetic and reactive rather than utilitarian and proactive. Additional mechanisms and determinants are suggested as predictors of emotions triggered by music.

Music comprises a diverse category of cognitive phenomena that likely represent both the effects of psychological adaptations that are specific to music (e.g., rhythmic entrainment) and the effects of adaptations for non-musical functions (e.g., auditory scene analysis). How did music evolve? Here, we show that prevailing views on the evolution of music – that music is a byproduct of other evolved faculties, evolved for social bonding, or evolved to signal mate quality – are incomplete or wrong. We argue instead that (...) music evolved as a credible signal in at least two contexts: coalitional interactions and infant care. Specifically, we propose that (1) the production and reception of coordinated, entrained rhythmic displays is a co-evolved system for credibly signaling coalition strength, size, and coordination ability; and (2) the production and reception of infant-directed song is a co-evolved system for credibly signaling parental attention to secondarily altricial infants. These proposals, supported by interdisciplinary evidence, suggest that basic features of music, such as melody and rhythm, result from adaptations in the proper domain of human music. The adaptations provide a foundation for the cultural evolution of music in its actual domain, yielding the diversity of musical forms and musical behaviors found worldwide. (shrink)

Two themes in music cognition research are highlighted—inspired by the contributions in this volume: (a) statistical learning and (b) evolutionary theorizing. Our ability to test alternatives to statistical learning is threatened by the rapidly diminishing opportunities for cross‐cultural studies unconfounded by bimusicalism. Our ability to infer possible evolutionary origins for music is confounded by the “hedonic plenitude” of modern music‐making—where multiple pleasure channels are activated simultaneously. Cognitively inspired music research will benefit by studying a wider range of musical cultures. Evolutionary (...) theorizing will benefit by further work involving comparative animal behavior. (shrink)

Current research on emotional responses to dissonance has yielded consistent data in both developmental psychology and neuroscience. What seems to be lacking is a definition of what might constitute dissonance in non-musical domains. Thus, contrary to Juslin & Vll's (J&V) proposal for the need to distinguish between six broad mechanisms, I argue that future research should rather focus on perceptual determinants of each basic emotion.