Tests have shown that a baby's nervous system arrives
pre-equipped to form a musical grammar. Babies can recognize and
remember tunes, display a preference for consonance over dissonance, and
even identify individual scales and chords. These results suggest to
scientists that the perception of music is an evolutionary ancient
neutral skill, not some by-product of more recent cognitive processes.
Music, and our sense of what it sounds like, begins as a way to
comprehend the world around us - to recognize patterns and make accurate
predictions about what comes next, for example - and survives as
something we can enjoy for its own sake. Music is first a means to form a
worldview, to represent the world, to ponder and study it - to 'record'
it. Only later does it become 'music.'"
- Greg Milner, "
Perfecting Sound Forever": An Aural History of Recorded Music (Faber and Faber, Inc., 2009)
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