-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If I had to come up with a just-so story about the origins of music, it would probably be something like this: because it leaves few words that can be substituted in other than the original ones, putting statements in meter and rhyme makes them easier to remember. So proto-humans subject Important Statements That Should Be Remembered to poetic discipline. This means that meter, rhyme, a regular tonal rhythm begin to function as a signal of the importance of statements, making it adaptive to recognize these things. Peacock's tail-type mechanisms take everything from there. This is about as scientific as any other explanation of its type, I suppose.
^^^^^^^ CB: I'm in substantial agreement with the idea that music , language and , in fact all culture, have a major "mnemonic device" component in them. Culture carries intergenerational "memories", from "time in memorium" (smile).
See Levi-Strauss' _Mythologique_. He makes a fundamental comparison between music and American indigenous myths
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss
Now a worldwide celebrity, Lévi-Strauss spent the second half of the 1960s working on his master project, a four-volume study called Mythologiques. In it, he took a single myth from the tip of South America and followed all of its variations from group to group up through Central America and eventually into the Arctic circle, thus tracing the myth's spread from one end of the American continent to the other. He accomplished this in a typically structuralist way, examining the underlying structure of relationships between the elements of the story rather than by focusing on the content of the story itself. While Pensée Sauvage was a statement of Lévi-Strauss's big-picture theory, Mythologiques was an extended, four-volume example of analysis. Richly detailed and extremely long, it is less widely read than the much shorter and more accessible Pensée Sauvage despite its position as Lévi-Strauss's masterwork.