Musiquer : plaidoyer évolutionniste transdisciplinaire
The subject is based on an assumption: originally, the music is a cultural and a biological phenomenon, it is social (and not private) and institutional (and not individual). Several evolutionary theorists of language and/or music support the hypothesis that the purpose of language/music is beyond the opposition between nature and culture. Assuming those characteristics, then what is their influence on the development of musicality or of a faculty of music? To advance our thinking, we point out researches on the musical brain. Precisely, we evaluate the contribution of researches on amusia to the question of the origin of music. Subsequently, we study the relationship between intentionality and the evolution of music. Then, we focus on the social nature of the musical phenomenon, and propose to integrate social and biological characterization of music in a community and institutional conception. From then on, our assumption is philosophically founded and we assume that it can be an appropriate vehicle to exceed the disciplinary’s limits. Finally, we present some options proposed by different authors describing the contribution of music to the development of neural networks with a “mirror” property. Then, we try to answer this inevitable question: can music, given its irreducibly cultural, social and institutional characteristics, maintain neural connections? About this part, we examine the implications of chaos theory and the results of computer simulations.
Philosophy Music Language Mirror neurons Evolution Transdisciplinarity