Isn't musicality more than rhythm?

Last month, we organized a follow-up to the 2014 Lorentz Workshop on Musicality in Leiden, The Netherlands. Twelve years later, it felt both exciting and meaningful to return to Leiden with a renewed focus: spectral percepts. 

While rhythm cognition has received substantial attention over the past decade, key perceptual dimensions of melodic cognition—especially timbre and pitch—remain comparatively underexplored. Many comparative studies still rely on simplified stimuli, such as pure tones, which may limit our understanding of how non-human animals perceive melodic structure. Recent findings suggest that pitch and timbre do not map uniformly across species, inviting us to rethink how these percepts are studied. 

We therefore deliberately shifted attention away from rhythm perception and production toward the perceptual and affective dimensions of melody, harmony, and timbre. In doing so, we revisited Darwin’s idea that animals may not only perceive melodies, but may also take pleasure in them (see workshop proposal). 

What made this workshop especially rewarding was the remarkable diversity of backgrounds and expertise in the room. Researchers from neurobiology, psychology, ethnomusicology, musicology, and evolutionary theory came together to examine the evolutionary and perceptual roles of pitch, timbre, and consonance. This breadth of perspectives allowed us to explore how these percepts vary across species, cultures, and contexts in ways no single discipline could address alone. 

By bringing together such a broad and inspiring group of researchers, the workshop generated new insights, strengthened interdisciplinary collaborations, and laid the groundwork for a more coherent framework on the evolution and cognition of musicality. 

A special issue is planned for Spring 2027, in which we will summarize the workshop’s findings, develop new research ideas, and outline a future agenda for musicality research. 

Photo credits: (cc) 2026 Bas Cornelissen and Lorentz Center.

No progress since Darwin and Spencer?

Darwin and Spencer.

Asif Ghazanfar and Gavin Steingo open their recent Commentary in Science, by asserting that –because no fossil or archaeological record of early music-making exists– modern musicality researchers “rely as much on conjecture as they did in Darwin and Spencer’s time.” 

This characterization is inaccurate. 

The evolution of musicality can be reconstructed using methods from comparative biology, genetics, and cross-cultural analyses, empirical domains that were unavailable to Darwin and Spencer. 

Over the past twenty years, musicality research has shown that virtually all humans have a natural capacity for music (1, 2), comparable to our innate capacity for language. Examples include beat processing in human newborns (3), species-specific precursors of both rhythmic and pitch processing (4, 5), and showing cross-cultural ‘universals’ in the structural aspects of human music (6–8), suggesting a biological basis. Additionally, recent neuroscientific findings indicate that humans process speech and music through distinct — and possibly independently evolved — neural pathways (9). Together, these findings constitute a robust empirical foundation rather than conjecture and have substantially reshaped our understanding of musicality. 

While trained tapping in macaques (10)—as discussed in Ghazanfar and Steingo’s Perspective—addresses only one subcomponent of musicality, it nonetheless offers a valuable window into its evolution, particularly within the framework of the Gradual Audiomotor Evolution (GAE) hypothesis (11). This hypothesis proposes that beat perception and synchronization emerged through incremental increases in the connection between cortical and subcortical motor planning regions. Probing beat perception and isochrony perception in animals is still in its infancy, but it appears, at least within the primate lineage, that beat perception has evolved gradually, peaking in humans and present only with some limitations in chimpanzees and other non-human primates (12, 13). 

Lastly, the relevant object of inquiry here is not music per se, but musicality. For this reason, Ghazanfar and Steingo’s analogy comparing the study of music evolution to ‘human bike evolution’ is unhelpful. Riding a bike requires explicit training even in humans, whereas moving to a musical beat emerges spontaneously and effortlessly, often before the onset of language. This spontaneity is precisely what places beat perception so prominently within musicality research. In other primates, beat perception is not effortless but can be acquired through training, suggesting that for them it is analogous to bike riding in humans. As the authors note, studying trained abilities can nevertheless reveal the basic processes underlying those abilities. More generally, both spontaneous and trained behaviors in animals offer complementary insights into their evolutionary capacities: humans spontaneously acquire speech but can be trained to imitate bird calls, indicating a specialized drive for conspecific communication alongside a broader capacity for vocal imitation. Similarly, non-human primates possess timing and pattern-detection abilities that may form the evolutionary substrate from which human beat induction emerged. Overall, comparative research across cultures and across species provides a powerful framework for uncovering the biological foundations and evolutionary history of musicality. 

As a result, investigating the origins of musicality has become increasingly feasible. What was once a largely speculative corner of musicology has developed into a rapidly advancing interdisciplinary field, rich with compelling new research questions.  

Published as eLetter in Science on December 9, 2025; Written by Henkjan Honing - University of Amsterdam, NL; W. Tecumseh Fitch - University of Vienna, AT; Marisa Hoeschele - Austrian Academy of Sciences, AT; Hugo Merchant - Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, MX; A preprint is available at OSF.

 

References

1. H. Honing, C. ten Cate, I. Peretz, S. E. Trehub, Without it no music: cognition, biology and evolution of musicality. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 370, 20140088 (2015).
2. W. T. Fitch, Four principles of bio-musicology. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 370, 197–202 (2015).
3. I. Winkler, G. P. Háden, O. Ladinig, I. Sziller, H. Honing, Newborn infants detect the beat in music. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 106, 2468–71 (2009).
4. C. ten Cate, H. Honing, “Precursors of music and language in animals” in The Oxford Handbook of Language and Music, D. Sammler, Ed. (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2025; https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/59773).
5. M. Hoeschele, H. Merchant, Y. Kikuchi, Y. Hattori, C. ten Cate, Searching for the origins of musicality across species. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 370 (2015).
6. J. H. McDermott, A. F. Schultz, E. A. Undurraga, R. A. Godoy, Indifference to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception. Nature 25, 21–25 (2016).
7. P. E. Savage, S. Brown, E. Sakai, T. E. Currie, Statistical universals reveal the structures and functions of human music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, 8987–8992 (2015).
8. N. Jacoby, E. H. Margulis, M. Clayton, E. Hannon, H. Honing, J. Iversen, T. R. Klein, S. A. Mehr, L. Pearson, I. Peretz, M. Perlman, R. Polak, A. Ravignani, P. E. Savage, G. Steingo, C. J. Stevens, L. Trainor, S. Trehub, M. Veal, M. Wald-Fuhrmann, Cross-cultural work in music cognition: Challenges, insights and recommendations. Music Percept 37, 185–195 (2020).
9. P. Albouy, L. Benjamin, B. Morillon, R. J. Zatorre, Distinct sensitivity to spectrotemporal modulation supports brain asymmetry for speech and melody. Science (1979) 367, 1043–1047 (2020).
10. V. G. Rajendran, L. Prado, J. Pablo Marquez, H. Merchant, Monkeys have rhythm. Science (1979) 390, 940–944 (2025).
11. H. Merchant, H. Honing, Are non-human primates capable of rhythmic entrainment? Evidence for the gradual audiomotor evolution hypothesis. Front Neurosci 7, 1–8 (2014).
12. H. Honing, F. L. Bouwer, L. Prado, H. Merchant, Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) sense isochrony in rhythm, but not the beat. Front Neurosci 12 (2018).
13. Y. Hattori, M. Tomonaga, Rhythmic swaying induced by sound in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 117, 936–942 (2019).

 

Interested in reading what music cognition is (or could be) about?

Music Cognition: The Basics (Routledge, 2021) considers the role of our cognitive functions, such as perception, memory, attention, and expectation in perceiving, making, and appreciating music.  (N.B. Use code SMA09 to get 20% 0ff.)

This volume explores the active role these functions play in how music makes us feel; exhilarated, soothed, or inspired. Grounded in the latest research in areas of psychology, biology, and cognitive neuroscience, and with clear examples throughout, this book concentrates on underappreciated musical skills such as sense of rhythm, beat induction, and relative pitch, that make people intrinsically musical creatures — supporting the conviction that all humans have a unique, instinctive attraction to music.

"Insights from one of the leading researchers working at the intersection of music, psychology, and computer science."  

Dan Levitin, author of This is your brain on music 

"A graceful and precise introduction into the intricacy of what ordinary humans manage to learn about music, naturally and automatically, just by listening." 

Gary Marcus, author of Guitar Zero 

"Honing demonstrates that ordinary listeners, whether children or adults, are a lot more musically savvy than they think they are."  

Sandra Trehub, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto

Interested in bridging data science and music research during a PhD at the UvA?

The UvA Data Science Centre seeks to accelerate data driven research within the UvA. Part of that mission is to foster interdisciplinary research. Specifically, in this call, the UvA aims to foster research into new data science methods that help to tackle hard challenging problems in a given domain. Such interaction is realized through joint supervision of the proposed PhD project: one supervisor with core expertise in data science methods, the other with core expertise in the domain problem. 

For details on the PhD-program see here.  

If interested, please contact MCG before September 1, 2021.

Deadline for final applications:  September 23, 2021,17:00.

Interested in a Summer School on Musicality?

From 14-24 June 2021 an impressive cast of international lecturers (click on poster on the left), from a wide range of disciplines, will try to unravel our capacity for music. Students will, next to attending lectures, work groups and online social events, work in groups with a designated tutor on a research project, within the broad topic of musicality, which they will present towards the end of the Summer School. 

The ABC Summer School will be taught online (Zoom); The closing ABC Symposium will be hybrid. 

Credits: 4 ECTS. Tuition: €275. N.B. This fee will be waived for all students registered at a Dutch university.

Detailed information can be found at mcg.uva.nl/summerschool.

Interested in doing a Minor in Amsterdam?

The minor Music, Culture, Cognition enables students to establish links between culture and cognition through the study of music across cultures (and potentially even across species). It offers a unique combination of cultural theory and methods from the cognitive sciences through a focus on music, its workings, functions and origins. You will be working with experts from the fields of both cultural musicology and music cognition. See for more information the UvA website.

Interested in a Summer School on Musicality?

Preliminary announcement: The Music Cognition Group (MCG) at the University of Amsterdam is currently preparing a two-week international online (and potentially hybrid) ABC Summer School on musicality from 21-24 June 2021. 

 

Lectures will include Isabelle Peretz, Sandra Trehub, Elizabeth Hellmuth-Margulis, Miriam Mosing, Patrick Savage, Julia Kursell, Carel ten Cate, members of MCG, and others. 

 

In the next few weeks more information will be made available online at summerschool.uva.nl.

Interested in a research masters course on musicality?

How Music Works: Music Cognition (MSc course Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 6 EC) | Prof. dr H. Honing and guest lecturers | Start 2020 semester 2, block 2.

The aim of the course is to identify the cognitive, biological and mechanistic underpinnings for music cognition as key ingredients of musicality, to assess to what extent these are unique to humans, and by doing so providing insight in their potential biological origins. As such this course has the aspiration to lay a new, interdisciplinary and comparative foundation for the study of musicality (Honing, 2018).

In addition this course will discuss recent developments in the research field of music cognition. Topics include a) the origins and evolution of musicality, b) the cognition of rhythm and melody, c) musical competence, d) relation between music and nonmusical abilities, and e) the similarities and differences between music and language. The topics might change due to recent developments.

For detailed information, and how to register as a secondary subject, see UvA Studiegids 2019/20.


Honing, H. (ed.) (2018). The Origins of Musicality. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Interested in rhythm and synchrony?

Preliminary announcement:

From 29 July 2019 through 2 August 2019 a workshop entitled Synchrony and Rhythmic Interaction: From Neurons to Ecology will be organized at the Lorentz Center, NL. It will bring together, for the first time, scholars from several disciplines aiming to exchange insights on synchrony and rhythmic interaction, from the neural level to ecology.

See for more information the Lorentz Center website.

What makes music special to us?

We are all born with a predisposition for music, a predisposition that develops spontaneously and is refined by listening to music. Nearly everyone possesses the musical skills essential to experiencing and appreciating music. Think of “relative pitch,”recognizing a melody separately from the exact pitch or tempo at which it is sung, and “beat perception,”hearing regularity in a varying rhythm. Even human newborns turn out to be sensitive to intonation or melody, rhythm, and the dynamics of the noise in their surroundings. Everything suggests that human biology is already primed for music at birth with respect to both the perception and enjoyment of listening.

Human musicality is clearly special. Musicality being a set of natural, spontaneously developing traits based on, or constrained by, our cognitive abilities (attention, memory, expectation) and our biological predisposition. But what makes it special? Is it because we appear to be the only animals with such a vast musical repertoire? Is our musical predisposition unique, like our linguistic ability? Or is musicality something with a long evolutionary history that we share with other animals?

Read the full article in Nautilus Magazine of March 14, 2019.

Interested in doing a Master in Amsterdam?

Application deadline for our one-year English-language MA programme in music studies is extended. You can apply until Sunday 3 March 2019 23:59 hours CET. Check it out now at www.musicstudies.nl and spread the word!

N.B. For Dutch/EU students the deadline is 15 May.

Want to know how music works?

mcg.uva.nl/howmusicworks

The University of Amsterdam offers two Master-level courses grouped under the name How Music Works. Several members of the Music Cognition Group contribute their various backgrounds to these courses, ranging from music theory and cognitive science to psychology and computer science. Next to outlining the theoretical underpinnings and presenting an up-to-date view of the field of music cognition, it provides practical hands-on classes presenting a variety of computational techniques and experimental designs.

See here for more information on all courses related to the Music Cognition Group (MCG@ILLC).

Interested in doing a PhD in the Humanities on a topic related to Music Cognition?

The aim of the NWO PhDs in the Humanities funding instrument is to increase the number of young talented researchers in the humanities, and to facilitate their progression on the academic career ladder. Deadline for proposals is 7 March 2019.

N.B. In January 2019 more information about the pre-selection procedure of the ILLC (UvA) will be announced. For now, see the link mentioned at the MCG@ILLC website for additional information or contact one of the MCG members via the p.a. of MCG <pa@musiccogntion.nl> to discuss possible topics. For logistic questions feel free to e-mail the ILLC office <phd-illc@uva.nl>.

Do you like music?

Cognitive biologist Andrea Ravignani (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, B / Sealcentre Pieterburen, NL) wrote an elaborate review of The Origins of Music (2018, The MIT Press) that appeared last week in Perception:

"Do you like music? is a typical question that rarely triggers a negative reply. But why is music so common in humans despite its lack of an obvious evolutionary function? This and other questions are tackled in The Origins of Musicality. The book is the most complete overview of the novel, interdisciplinary field also known as the evolution of music. Notice that the term musicality in the title is more accurate, as it emphasises the biological, perceptual, and cognitive aspects of the cultural artefact called music. This distinction is not a mere technicality; juxtaposing music with musicality is an achievement for this field, an operational distinction that the language sciences are still hotly debating."

Read the full review here.

Honing, H. (Ed.). The Origins of Musicality. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018; 392 pp.: ISBN 9780262037457, $50.00 or £40.00 Hardback. For more information see website of the MIT Press.

The Origins of Musicality | Out in April

Hardcover | 392 pp. | ISBN: 9780262037457

Expected to be out in April 2018 at The MIT Press.

Research shows that all humans have a predisposition for music, just as they do for language. All of us can perceive and enjoy music, even if we can’t carry a tune and consider ourselves “unmusical.” This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the capacity to perceive, appreciate, and make music. Scholars from biology, musicology, neurology, genetics, computer science, anthropology, psychology, and other fields consider what music is for and why every human culture has it; whether musicality is a uniquely human capacity; and what biological and cognitive mechanisms underlie it.

Contributors outline a research program in musicality, and discuss issues in studying the evolution of music; consider principles, constraints, and theories of origins; review musicality from cross-cultural, cross-species, and cross-domain perspectives; discuss the computational modeling of animal song and creativity; and offer a historical context for the study of musicality. The volume aims to identify the basic neurocognitive mechanisms that constitute musicality (and effective ways to study these in human and nonhuman animals) and to develop a method for analyzing musical phenotypes that point to the biological basis of musicality.

Contributors
Jorge L. Armony, Judith Becker, Simon E. Fisher, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Bruno Gingras, Jessica Grahn, Yuko Hattori, Marisa Hoeschele, Henkjan Honing, David Huron, Dieuwke Hupkes, Yukiko Kikuchi, Julia Kursell, Marie-Élaine Lagrois, Hugo Merchant, Björn Merker, Iain Morley, Aniruddh D. Patel, Isabelle Peretz, Martin Rohrmeier, Constance Scharff, Carel ten Cate, Laurel J. Trainor, Sandra E. Trehub, Peter Tyack, Dominique Vuvan, Geraint Wiggins, Willem Zuidema.

P.S. The cover photo is from an installation by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot:

Interested in doing a Masters in Amsterdam?

For more information on how to register, see here.

N.B. The deadline for international students is 1 March 2018.

Want to know how music works?

www.mcg.uva.nl/howmusicworks

The University of Amsterdam now offers two Master-level courses grouped under the name “How Music Works”. Several members of the Music Cognition Group contribute their various backgrounds to these courses, ranging from music theory and cognitive science to psychology and computer science. Next to outlining the theoretical underpinnings and presenting an up-to-date view of the field of music cognition, it provides practical hands-on classes presenting a variety of computational techniques and experimental designs.

See for more information: www.mcg.uva.nl/howmusicworks

Interested in becoming the new PA at MCG?

The Music Cognition Group (MCG) searches for an enthusiastic and well-organized personal assistant (PA) for 2017/18 (0.2 fte for 1 year). For more information and detailed instructions on how to apply see here. N.B. You have to be a student at UvA. 

Deadline for applications is 1 September 2017.

Interested in music, language and cognition?

Lake Como School of Advanced Study

In recent years, the relationships and interactions between language, music and the brain have stimulated substantial interest in the scientific community; the study of these relationships is emerging as a new interdisciplinary field, involving psychology, linguistics, music and neuroscience. An interesting aspect of these studies is how they focuses attention on an often neglected area of human behavior, namely its temporal dimension. Bio-musicological and neuro-linguistic studies have produced significant findings for our understanding of cognitive and social processes, of evolution, and for the role that music may have in education and in rehabilitation of language and, more generally, of cognitive disorders.

The Summer School “Music, Language and Cognition” offers an extended overview of complex behavioral events whose existence is time dependent, including language, music and body movement. We focus on how sounds, melodies, rhythm and syntactic information in music and language may afford the extraction of regularities, the generation of expectations, the coordination of perception and action, the directing of attention, and the priming of interactive social behavior. Lecturers will be integrated by brain storming and students presentations.

See the website more information.

Interested in becoming the new PA at MCG?

The Music Cognition Group (MCG) searches for an enthusiastic and well-organized personal assistant (PA) for 2017 (0.2 fte for 1 year). For more information and detailed instructions on how to apply see here. N.B. You have to be a student at UvA. 

Deadline for applications is 15 January 2017.