The Role of Mothers in the Origins of Music

A leading researcher has proposed that the key to understanding the origin of music is in the playful language used between mother and child. A In a recent lecture Richard Parncutt, a professor of systematic musicology at the University of Graz, Austria, discussed the idea that music originated from 'motherese' - the playful voices mothers adopt when speaking to infants and toddlers. According to the theory, evolutionary growth in human brain size between one and two million years ago ...