Human conscious experience consists of many forms of awareness, from simple
sensations to different kinds of emotions and elaborate visual and
conceptual categories. An increasing number of scholars admit that not only
humans but also other animals possess consciousness. However, the
uniqueness of human propositional language and other conceptual phenomena
suggests that there is a substantial difference between the consciousness
of humans and other animals. Ginsburg and Jablonka have recently referred
to the Aristotelian dichotomy between the ‘sensitive’ and ‘rational soul’
in order to emphasize the evolutionary sources of this difference. The aim
of this proposal is to indicate that the emotional reactions to musical
syntax represent a form of consciousness that preceded the appearance of a
human conceptual mind. In contrast to the standard explanation that musical
syntax appeared thanks to the evolution of language, the proposed view
leads to the opposite explanation. Emotional experience, being
pre-conceptual and an evolutionarily old form of stimuli assessment, became
the first mental reference of hierarchical, syntactic relations as the
result of the evolution of cortical and subcortical interactions. Only
later were the complex syntactic dependencies involved in conceptual
operations leading to the development of reflective consciousness. This
view is supported by the facts that the experience and recognition of
musical syntax do not necessitate any awareness of conceptual properties,
and that the auditory-motor synchronization as well as the vocal control of
sound frequency – the abilities that are crucial for the production of
rhythm and pitch syntaxes, are both based on cortico-subcortical loops.