Musicality and the intrinsic motive pulse: evidence from human psychobiology and infant communication

Abstract

Musicality in human motives, the psycho-biological source of music, is described as a talent inherent in the unique way human beings move, and hence experience their world, their bodies and one another. It originates in the brain images of moving and feeling that generate and guide behaviour in time, with goal-defining purposefulness and creativity. Intelligent perception, cognition and learning, and the potentiality for immediate sympathy between humans for expressions of intrinsic motives in narrative form (linguistic and non-linguistic), depend on this spontaneous, self-regulating brain activity. It is proposed that evolution of human bipedal locomotion and the pressure of social intelligence set free a new polyrhythmia of motive processes, and that these generate fugal complexes of the Intrinsic Motive Pulse (IMP), with radical consequences for human imagination, thinking, remembering and communicating. Gestural mimesis and rhythmic narrative expression of purposes and images of awareness, regulated by, and regulating, dynamic emotional processes, form the foundations of human intersubjectivity, and of musicality. Acquired musical skill and the conventions of musical culture are animated from this core process in the human mind. Research on the dynamics of protoconversations and musical games with infants elucidates the rhythmic and prosodic foundations of sympathetic engagement in expressive exchanges. Developments in the first year prove the importance of the impulses of natural musicality in the emergence of cooperative awareness, and show how shared participation in the expressive phrases and emotional transformations of vocal games can facilitate not only imitation of speech, but interest in all shared meanings, or conventional uses, of objects and actions. Disturbances of early communication attributable to emotional unavailability of a depressed mother, or those due to sensory, motor or emotional handicap that causes a child to fail to react in an expected normal way, both confirm the crucial function in the development of intelligence and personality of sympathetic motives shared between adult and child in a secure and affectionate relationship, and offer a way of promoting development by supporting these motives. These facts establish that the parameters of musicality are intrinsically determined in the brain, or innate, and necessary for human development. Through their effects in emotional integration and the collaborative learning that leads to mastery of cultural knowledge, cultural skills, and language, they express the essential generator of human cognitive development.