What Makes Two Melodies Feel the Same? [in 333 words]

(McAdams & Cunible, 1992).

One of the most intriguing questions in music cognition research is also one of the simplest: when are two melodies experienced as the same?

At first glance, the answer might seem obvious — they share the same notes, in the same order, with the same rhythm. But a closer look, across cultures and even across species, reveals a more complex picture. What our brains latch onto when recognizing a tune involves a web of spectral percepts — the fundamental features of sound that guide humans and other animals in interpreting auditory patterns. This may sound like a niche research topic, but it lies at the heart of debates about authorship, originality, and musical ownership.

Consider hearing a melody played in a different key or on an unfamiliar instrument. Most people can still recognize it. How is this possible? Explanations often point to intervallic structure — the sequence of pitch intervals between notes — the contour, which is the overall shape of a melody as it rises and falls, or timbre, often described as the “color” of sound, including brightness, texture, and loudness.

For decades, music research treated timbre as secondary — something layered over supposedly “meaningful” musical features like pitch and rhythm. Increasing evidence now suggests timbre is not merely decorative but a core perceptual building block. Timbre may also support “relative listening,” the ability to track patterns of change across different features. Exploring it carefully could reveal flexible and universal aspects of music cognition previously underestimated.

Recognizing that humans and non-human animals may rely on different spectral cues is equally crucial for understanding music’s evolutionary roots. A melody meaningful to humans may not register as such for a zebra finch — and vice versa.

By broadening music cognition research to include timbre, spectral contour, and species-specific strategies, scientists hope to uncover the shared perceptual foundations of musicality. Such work moves us closer to answering a deceptively simple but deeply complex question: what truly makes two melodies feel like the same song?

N.B. These entries are part of a new series of explorations on the notion of Spectral Percepts (in 333 words each).

References

McAdams, S, & Cunible, J-C (1992). Perception of timbral analogies. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 336, 383-389. 

Krumhansl, C. L. (1989). Why is musical timbre so hard to understand? In S. Nielzén & O. Olsson (Eds.), Structure and perception of electroacoustic sound and music (pp. 43– 53). Elsevier.

Want to test your musical memory?

Test your musical memory! A beta version of #TuneTwins is now online at https://tunetwins.app.

Note: Some things may still not work perfectly here and there. Please let us know via the feedback button – it helps us a lot!

Big thanks to Jiaxin, Noah, Bas, Ashley, Berit and the Music Cognition Group at large ! 

What do Bach, bipedalism and a baby crying have in common?

Human beings seem to have an innate sense of both rhythm and time, but how much is it biological and how much is it cultural? 

Feel free to join the  BètaBreak on June 20th between 12:00 and 13:30 at Science Park 904, Amsterdam, to explore the relationship between music and time in an interdisciplinary discussion with insights from biology, evolution, musicology and philosophy with speakers from the University of Amsterdam, the University of Liverpool and the University of Oslo! 

Music in our genes?

© ILLC Blog, Illustration by Marianne de Heer Kloots

 

 

"In 1984, a curious study on musicality in animals was published. The researchers from Portland, Oregon trained pigeons to distinguish two pieces of music – one by Bach, the other by Stravinsky. If the birds got it right, they were rewarded with food. Afterwards, the same pigeons were exposed to new pieces of music from the same composers. Surprisingly, they were still able to determine which piece was composed by which composer.

This finding confronted researchers with a new set of questions. To what extent are animals musical? What does it even mean for an animal to be musical? And what can this teach us about musicality in humans?" 

(From Music in our genes, ILLC Blog).

The interview is based on an episode of the podcast “Talk that Science” – an initiative started by students from the University of Amsterdam.

• Listen to the episode here (in Dutch);

• Link to the English transcript can be found here.

What is the use of the comparative approach in studying the origins of language and music?

Diagrammatic representation of the comparative
approach (as discussed in ten Cate & Honing, 2022/2025)

Comparative studies can be done in several ways. One approach is to examine the sounds made by animals and look for shared features or parallels with language or music. To study these, one can, for example, examine how the structure of a sequence of sounds compares to syntactic structures in language or rhythmic structures in music, or whether harmonic sounds are recognized by their pitch (like in music) or by their spectral structure (like in speech). The presence of such features can indicate that similar sensory or cognitive mechanisms may underlie their perception and production and those needed for language and music in humans. However, one needs to be cautious with drawing such conclusions. That a sound produced by an animal has certain features in common with language or music may be incidental and a result of human interpretation, rather than indicating shared mechanisms per se. Animal sounds showing, for example, a specific rhythmic pattern (e.g., in the call of the indri, a lemur species; De Gregorio et al., 2021) or that contain tones based on a harmonic series (e.g., in the hermit thrush; Doolittle et al., 2014), need not indicate an ability of the animal to perceive or produce rhythms or harmonic sounds in general, as is common in humans. To show this, it is necessary to demonstrate the perception or production of such patterns outside and beyond what is realized in the species-specific sound patterns. This requires a second approach: using controlled experiments to address whether animals can (learn to) distinguish and generalize artificially constructed sounds that differ in specific linguistic or musical features. The two approaches, observational-analytical and experimental, are complementary: the first one may hint at presence of a certain ability, while the second one can test its existence and the limits of the capacity (Adapted from: ten Cate & Honing, 2025).

De Gregorio, C., Valente, D., Raimondi, T., Torti, V., Miaretsoa, L., Friard, O., Giacoma, C., Ravignani, A. & Gamba, M. (2021). Categorical rhythms in a singing primate. Current Biology, 31(20), R1379–R1380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.09.032 

Doolittle, E. L., Gingras, B., Endres, D. M. & Fitch, W. T. (2014). Overtone-based pitch selection in hermit thrush song: Unexpected convergence with scale construction in human music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 11(46), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1406023111

Ten Cate, C. & & Honing, H. (2025). Precursors of Music and Language in Animals. Sammler, D. (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Language and Music Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192894700.013.0026. Preprint: psyarxiv.com/4zxtr.

Wetenschap in de blogosfeer? [Dutch]

Uit De bloggende wetenschap (Folia), over Music Matters | A blog on music cognition:

"Ik weet niet direct wat muziekcognitie is, maar dat is geen probleem. Dit is een prima blog, gemaakt door een vakidioot die zo te zien met liefde over het onderwerp schrijft. Hij blogt niet veel, niet eens een keer per week, maar wel uitgebreid en nauwkeurig. En voor hem is het voordeel dat hij nu gedwongen is te schrijven, het proces van zijn onderzoek met zijn volgers te delen en zijn gedachten te structureren en te verwoorden."