On the origin of music and language

Found a preview of the book How Music REALLY Works!, Chapter 1: What Music REALLY Is, Who Makes It, Where, When, Why, which deals with the origin of music, and a possible joint origin of music and language. Easily accessible, but quite informative. There's five other chapters availabe online.

An excerpt from chapter 1:

Language syntax (order or arrangement) and musical syntax appear to share common processes in the brain. Studies of brain activity during music and language processing show similarities in the way the brain handles temporal (time-related) aspects of both language and music. “When we listen to language and music, not only do we expect words or chords with specific meaning and function, but we also expect them to be presented on time!”

Music could have evolved from speech, or speech from music, or, more likely, both speech and music could have co-evolved, sharing a common ancestor that had some characteristics of speech, some of music. In early humans, the music-language precursor, termed “musilanguage” by the neuroscientist Steven Brown, would have conveyed referential meaning (i.e., information) and also emotional meaning, using discrete pitch levels and expressive phrasing.

Eventually, the musilanguage precursor would have split into two specialties:

• A specialty for conveying mainly referential meaning symbolically, (language), initially by expressive phrasing, and later using a vocabulary of words
• A specialty for conveying emotional meaning, mainly without symbolic meaning (music), via discrete pitch levels.
  

Music and language likely co-evolved, and therefore interacted.