The Evolution of Music in Comparative Perspective

Fitch, W. Tecumseh

doi:10.1196/annals.1360.004

Cited by 100 publications

(78 citation statements)

References 80 publications

(57 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The relationship between music and language is receiving increased attention (e.g., Fitch, 2005;Masataka, 2009;Patel, 2003). Researchers studying pitch perception, but not octave equivalence, have found effects of tonal language learning on relative and absolute pitch (Deutsch et al, 2009;Hove et al, 2010).…”

Section: Pitch Perception Is Not Unitarymentioning

confidence: 99%

Pitch chroma discrimination, generalization, and transfer tests of octave equivalence in humans

Hoeschele

Weisman

Sturdy

2012

Atten Percept Psychophys

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Octave equivalence occurs when notes separated by an octave (a doubling in frequency) are judged as being perceptually similar. Considerable evidence points to the importance of the octave in music and speech. Yet, experimental demonstration of octave equivalence has been problematic. Using go/no-go operant discrimination and generalization, we studied octave equivalence in humans. In Experiment 1, we found that a procedure that failed to show octave equivalence in European starlings also failed in humans. In Experiment 2, we modified the procedure to control for the effects of pitch height perception by training participants in Octave 4 and testing in Octave 5. We found that the pattern of responding developed by discrimination training in Octave 4 generalized to Octave 5. We replicated and extended our findings in Experiment 3 by adding a transfer phase: Participants were trained with either the same or a reversed pattern of rewards in Octave 5. Participants transferred easily to the same pattern of reward in Octave 5 but struggled to learn the reversed pattern. We provided minimal instruction, presented no ordered sequences of notes, and used only sine-wave tones, but participants nonetheless constructed pitch chroma information from randomly ordered sequences of notes. Training in music weakly hindered octave generalization but moderately facilitated both positive and negative transfer.

show abstract

Section: Pitch Perception Is Not Unitarymentioning

confidence: 99%

Pitch chroma discrimination, generalization, and transfer tests of octave equivalence in humans

Hoeschele

Weisman

Sturdy

2012

Atten Percept Psychophys

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…It has also been recognized that language emerged in close association with music (1,(46)(47)(48), and it is likely that any underlying common neural substrate would have propagated through primate evolution. Although monkeys have neither language nor musical abilities (49,50), they communicate by using vocalizations, and their drumming behavior may well be homologous to that used by humans in the context of instrumental music (1).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Monkey drumming reveals common networks for perceiving vocal and nonvocal communication sounds

Remedios

Logothetis

Kayser

2009

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Salient sounds such as those created by drumming can serve as means of nonvocal acoustic communication in addition to vocal sounds. Despite the ubiquity of drumming across human cultures, its origins and the brain regions specialized in processing such signals remain unexplored. Here, we report that an important animal model for vocal communication, the macaque monkey, also displays drumming behavior, and we exploit this finding to show that vocal and nonvocal communication sounds are represented by overlapping networks in the brain's temporal lobe. Observing social macaque groups, we found that these animals use artificial objects to produce salient periodic sounds, similar to acoustic gestures. Behavioral tests confirmed that these drumming sounds attract the attention of listening monkeys similarly as conspecific vocalizations. Furthermore, in a preferential looking experiment, drumming sounds influenced the way monkeys viewed their conspecifics, suggesting that drumming serves as a multimodal signal of social dominance. Finally, by using high-resolution functional imaging we identified those brain regions preferentially activated by drumming sounds or by vocalizations and found that the representations of both these communication sounds overlap in caudal auditory cortex and the amygdala. The similar behavioral responses to drumming and vocal sounds, and their shared neural representation, suggest a common origin of primate vocal and nonvocal communication systems and support the notion of a gestural origin of speech and music.gestures ͉ speech ͉ temporal lobe S ocial living requires effective means of expression and many species communicate by using sounds. Communication sounds can be as diverse as the methods used to produce them, covering a range of temporal rates and spectral frequencies, ranging from rattlesnake rattling and stork clapping to complex human speech. Interestingly, some species communicate not only by using a variety of sounds produced by the same means, but also by using sounds produced by different means. Humans, for example, produce vocal sounds including speech and nonspeech utterances, as well as nonvocal sounds-also called acoustic gestures (1-4). Acoustic gestures encompass a range of sounds such as the discrete knocking on a door, rhythmic hand clapping, and even thumping a table in anger. Animals, too, create sounds akin to acoustic gestures in addition to their vocalizations; for example, some nonhuman primates create sounds by chest beating or hand clapping (5-7), and rodents create sounds by drumming their paws on the ground (8). The use of nonvocal acoustic signals for communication raises two fundamental questions: first whether the same brain regions are specialized for the processing of vocal and nonvocal communication sounds; and second, whether vocal and nonvocal communication systems share a common evolutionary origin (2,3,(9)(10)(11)(12).Insights into the evolution of human communication systems can be revealed by comparative studies on closely related primate models, wh...

show abstract

“…This is challenging because the design features of music are variable and various (Fitch, 2005). Furthermore, although the functional purposes of music are often surprisingly similar between cultures and may be generically identifiable, the contexts where music is involved differ to a great extent between cultures (Cook, 1998).…”

Section: Variety Of Musicmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The answer may be that the recognition of emotional expression from music is not exclusively a musical capability, but instead a capability that evolved as an adaptation to a different challenge, and was then co-opted for music. While emotional expression may be a subcategory of the musical design feature a-referential expressiveness (Fitch, 2005(Fitch, , 2006, this does not entail that the capability for emotional expression processing is an exclusively ''musical'' capability. Like the capability for the production and perception of many other design features of music, emotional expression processing is probably a spin-off of one or several more general-purpose mechanisms.…”

Section: Music Universals At Different Levels Of Complexitymentioning

confidence: 99%