Abstract
Human musicality might have evolved for reasons related to cooperation, competition, or both. I will present the results of a project that investigated a curious phenomenon that (if taken with a grain of salt) can be seen to support the latter, mixed viewpoint. An initial study with a renowned boys choir (the St Thomas Choir of Leipzig) found that deep-voiced basses increased high-frequency energy in their voices when girls were in the audience. A recent follow-up study found that female and male listeners are similarly sensitive to this enhancement, but only females prefer it. This scenario is analogous to non-human male chorusing in crickets and frogs, where ‘cooperative’ synchrony arises through competitive mechanisms that cater to female preferences for energetic signals. A generous interpretation of these findings characterizes human chorusing as social communicative behavior that allows simultaneous group cooperation and sexually motivated competition. A more modest outcome is the demonstration of remarkable flexibility in modulating vocal timbre for individual expression in group contexts.
Bio
Peter Keller holds degrees in Music and Psychology from the University of New South Wales in Australia. He is a professor in the Center for Music in the Brain and the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University (Denmark), with a joint appointment in the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development at Western Sydney University (Australia). Previously, he led a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Leipzig, Germany), held a European Institutes for Advanced Study (EURIAS) Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and served as Editor of the interdisciplinary journal ‘Empirical Musicology Review.’ His research addresses the psychological and neurophysiological underpinnings of human interaction in musical contexts.