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# 2 More than Cheesecake? The similarities and differences between music and language Is music no more than auditory cheesecake, as Pinker would have us believe? Is it simply an evolutionary spin-off from language – a lucky break for humankind, providing song and dance as a relief from the tedium...

# 2 More than Cheesecake? The similarities and differences between music and language Is music no more than auditory cheesecake, as Pinker would have us believe? Is it simply an evolutionary spin-off from language – a lucky break for humankind, providing song and dance as a relief from the tedium of survival and reproduction? Or is this view itself simply a knee-jerk reaction to contrary claims that music is adaptive and as deeply rooted in our biology as language? Can either of these views be justified? How and why, if at all, are language and music related? The starting point for an answer to such questions is a careful consideration of their similarities and differences. The issue is not simply the manifest nature of language and music, but the extent to which they rely on the same evolved physical and psychological propensities that provide the capacities for language and music in our species, *Homo sapiens*. When dealing with such capacities, as much attention must be given to those for listening as to those for producing. I will begin this chapter with some uncontentious similarities, before addressing whether the three key features of language – symbols, grammar, and information transmission – are also found in music. ## Problematic definitions Bruno Nettl, the distinguished ethnomusicologist, defined music as 'human sound communication outside the scope of language'. That is perhaps as good a definition as we can get. When I refer to 'music', I mean something that we, as members of a modern Western society, would recognize as music. But we must immediately appreciate that the concept of music is culturally variable; some languages lack words or phrases to encompass music as the total phenomenon that we understand in the West. Instead, they may have words for specific types of musical activities, such as religious song, secular song, dance, and the playing of particular instruments. Even in the West, of course, music is partly in the ear of the beholder – although...