Jerry:
Birds don't make music -- they use sound for function.
Music has no function?
Bird song is not produced for joy but for vigilance.
You are making the common error of confusing the function of a behavior with the subjective experience of the one behaving. If you accept that birdsong is a conscious act, then birds do it because they enjoy doing so. This has the *effect* of attracting a mate or warning off rivals or alarming the flock or alerting them to a food supply (far more than mere vigilance, NB), but the bird does not consciously sing *for those purposes.* Similarly, a cat doesn't chase mice because it needs to kill one for food--it chases them because (as any cat owner will have observed) cats have a passion for chasing (and grabbing, and mauling) small, erratically moving objects regardless of edibility. The passion was naturally selected in them, because the most enthusiastic hunters eat best and are thererfore more likely to survive and reproduce--but the cat doesn't know that!
I don't think that any thoughtful person can deny any longer that huge chunks of human behavior (conventional wisdom says ~50%) are biologically determined. The question of whether, and to what extent, musical response is to be considered part of our biological heritage clearly has a number of folks on this list quite exercised--to the point of constructing straw men and intuition pumps.
To those who assert that music is a purely cultural phenomenon, I would point out that this idea has been put to the test, quite rigorously, by John Cage, who insisted that any sounds or combination of sounds could be construed as music if one merely had the will to do so, and spent 40 years of his life composing music on precisely that principle. Was this music as successful (moving, exciting, attractive) as other musics? Could other music, composed on the same principle, be more successful?
No, and no.
-- Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press
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