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Animal music is generally conceded to be intimately connected with sexual behaviour. When in evolutionary progress an aquatic environment was relinquished, air became a necessity for life, incorporated as part of the body, and so endowed with narcissistic libido. Since animal music is most prominent as a preliminary to mating in lower animals, it should belong to the pregenital stage of development in man. A fish can reduce its narcissistic libido-potential by ejaculation into the sea, but the advantages of terrestrial environment and more complex organization are at the expense of this convenience, which is replaced by the emission of a suitable substitute such as air, through a suitable orifice, such as a sphincter or larynx. The libido-charged column of air passes the muscles of the respiratory tract, whose tone is raised by a similar endowment. Thus narcissistic libido produces tone, both muscular and musical, and hence the origin of singing and so of all music. Theoretically singing may be related to conversion hysteria developed on a fixation in the anal-sadistic phase. It represents the ejection of accumulated primary narcissistic and auto-erotic libido by a sexually excited but immature organism that has not yet reached the stage of object love.
The current view that the content of music is expression seems therefore to be confirmed even verbally by its postulated biological origin. Music expresses feelings and their relations. The absence of an objective content corresponds with its narcissistic nature. Ferenczi has pointed out that the functional phenomena, in Silberer's sense, represent the part played by narcissism in the formation of symbols, and it is with just such functional phenomena that we are concerned in music. Music is thus distinguished