JMM – The Journal of Music and Meaning , vol.2, 2004, section 2 – printout. Original article URL: http://www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/showArticle.php?artID=2.2 [Refer to this article by section numbers, not by page number] Jakob Christensen-Dalsgaard Music and the Origin of Speeches Jakob Christensen-Dalsgaard Center for Sound Communication, Institute of Biology University of Southern Denmark Campusvej 55 DK-5230 Odense M, Denmark e-mail JCD@biology.sdu.dk Abstract As far as we know, music is a uniquely human trait. Theories of the origin of music are very speculative, since the adaptive significance of music is questionable, and it is very difficult to date the origin of music. I review the biological findings on animal communi- cation and human music and language processing and the available theories on the origin of music. I propose that the close link between music and human prosody (the non- semantic, slowly varying pitch contours and rhythms of speech), which is also corrobo- rated by recent neurophysiological experiments could reflect a common origin, and that an adaptive value of music could be related to rhetoric, which is an effective way of controlling or manipulating the emotions of a group. The close connections between mu- sic, rhetoric and prosody have been recognized since Plato. I argue that rhetoric also would have been important in early human societies, suggested by the fact that we are (still) surprisingly easy to manipulate using the right combinations of speech and music.