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Group Music and Social Bonding Theory
Popular music charts also reflect group participation in music. When not listening to the same hit songs en masse at concerts, people listen to the same songs at the same time on radio, television, webcasts, etc. Masses of young people purchase the same songs during the time those songs ride high on the charts. Rather than listen to a recording, people tend to prefer to go out and get a fix of the same music performed live—to experience the primal pleasure of identifying with, and entraining with, the musicians (and dancers). It’s akin to the pleasure of watching professional athletes.
Our savannah-dwelling hominid ancestors walked on two feet but did not stand tall, and had no claws or fangs. Easy meals for lethal predators. So, to protect themselves against strong, fast predators, and to successfully hunt game, hominids had to become sophisticated in group-living and cooperation. Human beings use each other as tools in the survival game. Naturally-selected traits arise in response to environmental pressure, which includes ourselves. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our fellow humans were an integral part of our environment, just as they are today. So we have evolved many brain adaptations that enable us to interact successfully with each other.
The expansion and evolution of human social structure drove the evolution of many mental tools for social behaviour (such as music and language). The cerebral cortex and the skull, therefore, kept getting bigger and bigger: encephalization. Humans have an encephalization factor of 7, meaning our brains are 7 times larger than would be expected for an animal of our size. Dolphins and porpoises are next, at 4 to 5, with chimpanzees and gorillas at 2.5. The one thing that animals with high encephalization factors have in common is that they’re all highly social.