Musical Repetition as Vocal Self-Simulation: A Mechanistic Account of Music's Origins

Abstract

Music has resisted definition. Attempts to characterise it by its products (organised sound, intentional structure, aesthetic experience) either exclude recognised forms or admit speech and environmental noise, and the field has largely settled on pluralism: the view that music comprises multiple non-equivalent concepts admitting no unifying principle. This paper argues the failure is one of approach rather than of subject, and proposes a mechanism-based account. Musical repetition is identified as the necessary and sufficient condition for the psychophysiological phenomenon of music: when a vocalisation is repeated with sufficient precision to signal deliberate production rather than reflexive recurrence, the listener's vocal-motor system simulates the sound in synchrony with hearing it, producing a neural state approximating self-production, and Hebbian association retrieves the arousal state that accompanies producing such a vocalisation. From this single mechanism the paper derives music's affective function, the felt embodiment of beat as anticipatory suppression of startle reflexes to predicted loud onsets, the repetitive structure of laughter and crying, and music's elaboration through pattern-processing circuits shared with language. The account is distinguished from vocal learning, social bonding, sexual selection and exaptation frameworks by its ability to generate testable predictions on which it stands or fails.