This sounds very interesting:

… Why is music – universally beloved and uniquely powerful in its ability to wring emotions – so pervasive and important to us? Could its emergence have enhanced human survival somehow, such as by aiding courtship, as Geoffrey F. Miller of the University of New Mexico has proposed? Or did it originally help us by promoting social cohesion in groups that had grown too large for grooming, as suggested by Robin M. Dunbar of the University of Liverpool? On the other hand, to use the words of Harvard University's Steven Pinker, is music just "auditory cheesecake" – a happy accident of evolution that happens to tickle the brain's fancy?

Read the whole thing here. Thanks, as so often, to Arts & Letters Daily.

Further quote that I couldn't resist:

… After suffering a stroke in 1953, Vissarion Shebalin, a Russian composer, could no longer talk or understand speech, yet he retained the ability to write music until his death 10 years later. …

He could not understand speech, yet he could write music. Amazing.