So there I was, reading a piece about what makes music memorable, when a guy says, “The reason we get earworms [super memorable phrases of music] in the first place is probably because music is an evolutionary adaptation, helping us to preserve factual and emotional information in an easily memorizable medium.”
Wrong. And it proves that the guy who said it isn’t a musician.
First, who here constantly uses music to preserve factual and emotional information? For facts, I’ve occasionally seen people setting them to music, but mostly there are about a hundred other mnemonic devises for preserving factual information that are better suited to the task. And while music might trigger emotions, it’s certainly not the best way to preserve them. In fact, music adds emotions even to the past ones it triggers. It’s constantly moving.
Anyone who’s a musician knows that there is nothing evolutionary about music. It simply doesn’t need to exist to help anyone survive, and it highlights all the failures of the evolutionary argument. For example, if music is evolutionary, then where did F# come from? A more evolved form of a Cb? Is there some long forgotten tone that people used to grunt before they landed on an A? And where is that tone now? Don’t they realize that every single ting of a fork to a glass, every thump of a rock on a tree, is, in some way, music?
And what will music be in a billion years? Oh, the evolutionists say, it will be fantastic but we can’t know, just like we can’t know what it was billions and billions of years ago. That’s the glory of thinking of such huge periods of time. You don’t have to answer anything. There is absolutely nothing random about music – the complexity and math alone underlying the whole thing clearly points to a creator.
In fact, music seems only to have the purpose of expressing all those various human emotions, whether they’re based on memory or not, and glorifying God. After all, it’s a gift from God, and its supernatural nature is exactly why so many musicians – versus, say, actors or other artsy types – constantly thank God when they get awards.
I don’t mind when scientists study music. In fact, I welcome it. But don’t say it’s in any way related to the concept of naturalist evolution.
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