Music in Speech
"Human musical preferences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algorithms or ratios but by the messy sounds of real life, and of speech in particular -- which in turn is shaped by our evolutionary heritage." An article in The Boston Globe from earlier this month summarizes research done by David Schwartz, Catherine Howe, and Dale Purves of Duke University (full article of their research can be found in the August 6th issue of The Journal of Neuroscience).
From the article by Christine Kenneally (who is writing a book about the evolution of language): "Schwartz, Howe, and Purves analyzed a vast selection of speech sounds from a variety of languages to reveal the underlying patterns common to all utterances. In order to focus only on the raw sound, they discarded all theories about speech and meaning and sliced sentences into random bites. Using a database of over 100,000 brief segments of speech, they noted which frequency had the greatest emphasis in each sound. The resulting set of frequencies, they discovered, corresponded closely to the chromatic scale. In short, the building blocks of music are to be found in speech."