Searching for the origins of musicality across species

Hoeschele, Marisa; Merchant, Hugo; Kikuchi, Y.; Hattori, Yuko; Cate, Carel ten

doi:10.1098/rstb.2014.0094

Cited by 93 publications

(102 citation statements)

References 112 publications

(158 reference statements)

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“…The study of cockatoo dancing to human music by Patel et al ( [76], see also [77]) helps define the entrainment phenomenon further by way of contrast with human performance. The bird's episodic stretches of on-the-beat synchrony emerged from intervening phase drifts over the full phase range in an erratic pattern, while the musical beat remained steady all along.…”

Section: Constraint No 4: Entrainmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Five fundamental constraints on theories of the origins of music

Merker

Morley

Zuidema

2015

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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One contribution of 12 to a theme issue 'Biology, cognition and origins of musicality'. The diverse forms and functions of human music place obstacles in the way of an evolutionary reconstruction of its origins. In the absence of any obvious homologues of human music among our closest primate relatives, theorizing about its origins, in order to make progress, needs constraints from the nature of music, the capacities it engages, and the contexts in which it occurs. Here we propose and examine five fundamental constraints that bear on theories of how music and some of its features may have originated. First, cultural transmission, bringing the formal powers of cultural as contrasted with Darwinian evolution to bear on its contents. Second, generativity, i.e. the fact that music generates infinite pattern diversity by finite means. Third, vocal production learning, without which there can be no human singing. Fourth, entrainment with perfect synchrony, without which there is neither rhythmic ensemble music nor rhythmic dancing to music. And fifth, the universal propensity of humans to gather occasionally to sing and dance together in a group, which suggests a motivational basis endemic to our biology. We end by considering the evolutionary context within which these constraints had to be met in the genesis of human musicality.

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Section: Constraint No 4: Entrainmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Five fundamental constraints on theories of the origins of music

Merker

Morley

Zuidema

2015

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…Hoeschele et al [54] pose critical questions such as what species to study and how to study them in searching for the components of musicality and their biological origins. They outline the contributions of artificial laboratory experiments to our understanding of various aspects of musicality such as absolute and relative pitch processing, rhythm processing and timbre processing.…”

Section: (A) Four Principles Of Bio-musicologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The study of more distant or unrelated species that share a similar trait (that is not homologous) can also contribute to an understanding of underlying mechanisms. The convergent evolution of particular traits in distant species (analogous trait or homoplasy; figure 2) is the main motivation for studying music perception in such species [54].…”

Section: Multicomponent Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Without it no music: cognition, biology and evolution of musicality

Honing

Cate

Peretz

et al. 2015

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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210

187

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Musicality can be defined as a natural, spontaneously developing trait based on and constrained by biology and cognition. Music, by contrast, can be defined as a social and cultural construct based on that very musicality. One critical challenge is to delineate the constituent elements of musicality. What biological and cognitive mechanisms are essential for perceiving, appreciating and making music? Progress in understanding the evolution of music cognition depends upon adequate characterization of the constituent mechanisms of musicality and the extent to which they are present in non-human species. We argue for the importance of identifying these mechanisms and delineating their functions and developmental course, as well as suggesting effective means of studying them in human and non-human animals. It is virtually impossible to underpin the evolutionary role of musicality as a whole, but a multicomponent perspective on musicality that emphasizes its constituent capacities, development and neural cognitive specificity is an excellent starting point for a research programme aimed at illuminating the origins and evolution of musical behaviour as an autonomous trait.

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“…Lately, however, music 56 research is being increasingly investigated by psychologists, neuroscientists, biologists, and computer 57 scientists [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. Scientists need rigorous and operational definitions.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Which melodic universals emerge from repeated signaling games?

Ravignani

Verhoef

2017

Preprint

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Main Text (Word count: 1197) 23Language and music are peculiar human behaviors. We spend a large portion of our lives speaking, 24 reading, processing speech, performing music and listening to tunes. At the same time, we still know very 25 little as to why and how these structured behaviors emerged in our species. For the particular case of 26 music, the mystery is even greater than language. Music is a widespread human behavior which does not 27 seem to confer any evolutionary advantage. A possible approach to study the origins of music is to 28 hypothesize and empirically test the mechanisms behind this structured behavior [1, 2]. For language, 29 potential mechanisms were first tested in-silico [3, 4], showing how random pairs of signal-meanings 30 become more structured and systematic when artificial agents play a 'game of telephone' with them. 31These results were replicated with human participants evolving a language-like system [5], confirming the 32 importance of computer simulations in testing hypotheses on the cultural evolution of human behavior. 33Finally, recent work applied this approach to musical rhythm [6], showing that musical structures can 34 indeed emerge via cultural transmission . 35 36A recent paper in Artificial Life adopted this methodological approach, testing the emergence of a sound 37 system at the boundary between music and language [7]. Similar to communication systems found in 38 humans, other animals and in-silico experiments, a meaning space was paired with a signal space. The 39 meaning space coincided with a set of pictures showing different facial emotional expressions. The signal 40 space was a set of 5-note patterns. Crucially, the experimenters randomly paired meanings to signals, 41 which were in turn randomly structured. These random pairings of emotional expressions and random 42 note sequences were then used in signaling games, where pairs of participants used note sequences to 43 communicate emotional states. The resulting signal-meaning pairs, with all their human-introduced 44 variations, were then used in new signaling games with new participants. Over time, the small biases 45 introduced in each artificial transmission step accumulated, displaying quantitative trends. In particular, 46 the authors found the emergence, over the course of artificial human generations, of features resembling 47 some properties of language and music. 49A number of methodological solutions make this paper quite valuable. For instance, an obvious potential 50 confound when mapping proto-musical structures to emotional states is that some of these mappings are 51 already ingrained and universal in human cognition [8]. The authors circumvent this potential confound 52 by using the Bohlen-Pierce (BP) scale [9], to which the average human being is never exposed, rather 53 than the common 12 tone equal temperament scale (the black and white piano keys). 54 55For centuries, the study of music has been the sole prerogative of the humanities. Lately, however, music 56 research is being increa...

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Searching for the origins of musicality across species

Cited by 93 publications

References 112 publications

Five fundamental constraints on theories of the origins of music

Five fundamental constraints on theories of the origins of music

Without it no music: cognition, biology and evolution of musicality

Which melodic universals emerge from repeated signaling games?

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