Language, Music, and Cheesecake

I heard a bit on NPR this morning describing music as "cheesecake," a pure accident, something we had the sensory and neurological equipment to appreciate, but had not evolved to seek or create. They then proceeded to a number of examples, for instance, monkeys could not be trained to follow a beat in a year of trying, but parrots could learn to dance on their own. This ability was evidently a characteristic of species that are vocal mimics. Now, you might ask what species of primates would be better described as vocal mimics than humans? This is the way that language is learned by infants. Parents make sounds that are easy for infants to produce, and imitate sounds that infants make, and infants try to imitate the sounds which they hear their parents making - vocal mimicry beyond doubt. Parrots seem to be using vocal mimicry as a means to bond together a large group of individuals in a complex environment. Mimicry allows individuals to interact and create bonds as individuals, and to hear where they are in the flock even if the environment does not allow them to see one another. Black birds gather in large flocks and sing in fall and winter near where I live. Each bird sings a simple repetitive part, but all the parts are locked together in rhythm. If some human ancestor did this, we would call the result music, but not so for  black  birds. One can imagine a human ancestral species behaving like this, the individuals spread out but still connected in a group. The individuals calling out relatively continually and imitating one another to show that they are members of the same group. The sounds they create can communicate many things, possible threats and presence of resources, but also emotions and relations between members of the group. Because the ability to bond and act as a group is a great survival advantage, evolution selects for enhanced neural and vocal equipment to make this form of communication more effective. Thus, by this model, music is older than language, and is what language evolves from. The main question for this model is why we move from being bipedal parrots with some specific threat calls to having specific calls for every object we see around us.