Music appears in all human cultures (Brown & Jordania, 2013; Savage et al., 2015; Mehr et al., 2019), and it seems that all humans have at least some capacity to make music, referred to here as musicality (Honing et al., 2015). Speculation about the origins of music go back at least as far as Darwin (1871). However, the adaptive advantages of musicality are not obvious, and have been hotly debated. The emerging field of evolutionary musicology may benefit from adopting an ethological perspective as a means of structuring future research. The questions posed by Tinbergen (1963) provide a useful starting point when considering the functions and mechanisms of any behaviour in any species, and may be equally applied to the study of music. These questions, as they relate to music, are as follows:
Function: Why do humans make music? How does musicality increase fitness (i.e. the capacity to survive and reproduce)?
Phylogeny: How did musicality evolve? When did humans start making music and how does human musicality compare with the musicality of other species?
Mechanism: How do humans make music? How does it achieve its effects?
Ontogeny: How does musicality develop over the lifetime of the individual? To what extent is musicality learnt or innate?
If science is to truly address the evolutionary functions of music, then music researchers must be asking the right questions. In addition to these questions, there are other considerations. It must be noted that musicality is not a monolith (Fitch, 2015), but rather a constellation of related abilities which may have evolved for different functions. Furthermore, musicality may be a product of bio-cultural co-evolution (Patel, 2023), e.g. human culture may have created an environment that selects for musicality. Musicality may also serve different functions across a human lifespan (e.g. Parncutt & Chuckrow, 2019). Thus, it is important to consider the ontogeny and phylogeny of musicality, while also considering its adaptive functions, and the mechanisms through which those functions are achieved. Therefore, Tinbergen's (1963) ethological framework may provide a useful foundation for systematic enquiry into the origins of music, from which hypotheses that address any of these four questions may follow.