Showing posts with label music evolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music evolution. Show all posts

Sunday, September 29, 2024

Musical Animals: Are We? Can There Be?

Lecture at Barenboim-Said Akademie in 2016.
Roughly ten years ago, I had the honor of being invited by the Barenboim-Said Akademie to deliver a public lecture in Berlin, Germany. The event, entitled Was Musik kann (What Music Can Do), celebrated the impact of music and musicianship on our lives. In my presentation I started with a listening experiment, in a playful attempt to challenge the audience. 

I invited the attendees—many of whom were professional musicians and distinguished educators at the Barenboim-Said Academy—to envision themselves as expert judges on a conservatory selection committee. They were asked to assess the musicianship of an ensemble based solely on a brief excerpt of a live recording I played for them. Emulating the traditional audition process, where candidates perform behind a curtain to ensure impartiality, I asked the audience to make their judgments based solely on what they heard. 

The audience's reaction was split; some were enthusiastic, while others were unimpressed. When asked for their thoughts, the positive responders praised the performance as experimental yet well-executed, whereas the negative ones criticized the timing as sloppy and the music as lacking melody. However, their opinions shifted dramatically after viewing a original video of the musicians: a group of Thai elephants, led by a human conductor, that were playing an array of percussion instruments and a mouth harmonica (see video registration). 

This example is not just amusing; it also highlights some pitfalls in the study of the biology of music. Although I influenced the audience by framing the test as an audition, their varied reactions reveal more about human perception than about the elephants’ musical abilities. This raises a fundamental question: what must an organism—whether human, elephant, or bird—perceive to experience something as music? For instance, while the songs of an Amazonian songbird may sound musical to us, this perception reflects our own biases. To truly understand a bird's sense of musicality, we must ask whether the bird hears its own song as music. This inquiry shifts the attention from studying the structure of music to studying the structure of musicality. 

Over the last two decades it has become evident that humans share a natural predisposition for music, akin to our inherent capacity for language (Hagoort, 2019). This predisposition, which I like to term musicality, encompasses a set of traits that develops spontaneously, is shaped by our cognitive abilities, as well being constrained by its underlying biology. Unlike music itself, which varies across cultures and societies, musicality refers to the cognitive and biological capacities that enable us to perceive and appreciate music, even among those who may not play an instrument or sing out of tune (Honing et al., 2015). 

The shift in the study of the origins of music, from studying the structural aspects of music to trying to understand the structure of our capacity for music, marks an important change in perspective in music research, as reflected in the titles of two foundational meetings and their resulting publications: The Origins of Music (Wallin et al., 2000) and, consequently, The Origins of Musicality (Honing, 2018b). While the cross-cultural study of the structure of music (melodic patterns, scales, tonality, etc.) has offered exciting insights (Mehr et al., 2019; Savage et al., 2015), the approach used in these studies is indirect: the object of study here is music—the result of musicality—rather than musicality itself. Hence it is virtually impossible to distinguish between the individual contributions of culture and biology. For example, it is not clear whether the division of an octave into small and unequal intervals in a particular musical culture results from a widespread theoretical doctrine or from a music perception ability or a biological constrained predisposition. 

All this is an important motivation to study the structure of musicality– i.e. the capacity for music–, its constituent components (see Table 1), and how these might be shared with other animals, aiming to disentangle the biological, cultural and environmental contributions to the human capacity for music. All these are topics that are elegantly addressed in the current volume. 

[This text is a fragment of a preliminary version of an introductory chapter of The Biology of Music (Ravignani, in press)]

Ravignani, A. (ed.) (in press) The Biology of Music: Interdisciplinary Insights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tuesday, November 07, 2023

How to keep a forest happy?

A BaYaka group of women and girls singing and clapping enthusiastically while resting during a hectic day's work in the forest (Courtesy: K. R.L. Janmaat, 2018).

A new study on the possible evolutionary origins of music  [Press Release]

[Newspaper article in Dutch]

Why is music so prevalent and universal in human societies? Does music serve an adaptive function, or it is just “auditory cheesecake”, as cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker infamously claimed: a delightful dessert but, from an evolutionary perspective, no more than a by-product of language?

The debate on the origins of music has intrigued scientists for centuries. The hypotheses range from music being a mating display in order to woo females, to a means to increase social bonding in group contexts. For the first time, a group of international and interdisciplinary researchers led by Karline Janmaat and her former MSc Student Chirag Chittar, have tested several hypotheses on music simultaneously in a modern foraging society during their daily search for food. They found that women during tuber finding events were more likely to sing in large groups of strangers and less likely to sing in large groups of individuals they knew. The study was part of an elaborate longitudinal study spanning 2 years and has now been published in Frontiers in Psychology.

Music makes the forest happy    

“We know from their communication about music that the BaYaka sing to “please the forest” so that it provides them with more food. What they dislike most is conflict, as they believe it would make the forest spirits angry. What intrigues me the most is that our behavioral observations nicely complement their verbal communication about music. The women sing more frequently when they search for food in groups that are large and contain fewer “friends”, in which conflicts about food are more likely to arise. To me, our study reveals that these foragers appear to use music as a tool to avoid potential future conflict. How amazing is that?!”, Janmaat says.

“This study gives important empirical insights in the possible origins of music, a topic that for long had to be mere speculation”, says coauthor Henkjan Honing, professor of Music Cognition at UvA. “It made us decide to intensify our interdisciplinary collaboration and to further study the role of music with the BaYaka in a project aiming to unravel the human capacity for music. We are excited to announce our plans to return to this captivating society next year, where music appears to occupy a central role that transcends language.”

Chittar, C., Jang, H., Samuni, L, Lewis, J, Honing, H., Van Loon, E.E., Janmaat, K.R.L. (2023). Music and its role in signaling coalition during foraging contexts in a hunter-gatherer society. Frontiers in Psychology. doi 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1218394.

Friday, February 24, 2023

What is your position on the possible origins of music/ality?

This blog-entry adds several new analyses and visualizations related to the topic of the origins of music/ality, as discussed in a recent issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS; cf.  Mehr et al., 2021; Savage et al., 2021). 

N.B. An interactive app, linking to the two target articles, the 60 commentaries, as well as the commentaries' position in this debate, can be found on GitHub.

The analyses presented below are based on a questionnaire that was send to the 60 commentary writers in 2021. 

Fig. 1 shows the outcome of that questionnaire asking to rate one's own position w.r.t. the two target articles on a five point scale from Strongly Critical to Strongly Supportive (N.B. We received 49 responses):

Fig. 1a: Individual ratings from the BBS Commentary Authors (N=49). Numbers/size show the amount of votes. N.B. An interactive version, linking the individual ratings to the Commentaries, is shown below.

Fig. 1b: Individual ratings from the BBS Commentary Authors (N=49).
Numbers/size: amount of votes; Color: support for one or the other position.
N.B. Click on the figure to run the interactive version
, linking the individual ratings to the Commentaries. [Alternative figures, data, and source code at GitHub]

Fig. 2 below shows the rating provided by Savage et al. (2021), where two raters judged the positions of all commentaries on the same two dimensions (but on a continuous scale):

Fig. 2: Ratings from Savage et al. (2021: Figure R1).
[Source code and data at GitHub]

Furthermore, we also did some simple numerical comparisons between the data presented in Fig. 1 and 2. The main observations are:

  1. For the Social Bonding hypothesis there is an agreement* between ratings shown in Fig. 1 and those of Fig.2 of .62 (Rater 1/Authors) and .69 (Rater 2/Authors). As such, the raters did a relatively good job in estimating the authors positions. 
  2. For the Credible Signalling hypothesis the agreement* was .51 (Rater 1/Authors) and .56 (Rater 2/Authors), suggesting the raters did less well in estimating the authors positions.

*Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC). Note that resolution of both ratings (Fig. 1 and 2) differ, which could affect the results.

Fig 3. shows the results on the question whether this two-dimensional representation was considered adequate by the commentary authors:

Fig. 3: In how far are the two dimensions sufficient to capture your position (N=49)? [Alternative figures, data, and source code at GitHub]


[Credits: Visualizations by Bas Cornelissen; Stats by Atser Damsma]

Mehr, S., Krasnow, M., Bryant, G., & Hagen, E. (2021). Origins of music in credible signaling. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, E60. doi:10.1017/S0140525X20000345

Savage, P., Loui, P., Tarr, B., Schachner, A., Glowacki, L., Mithen, S., & Fitch, W. (2021). Music as a coevolved system for social bonding. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, E59. doi:10.1017/S0140525X20000333

Honing, H. (2021). Unravelling the origins of musicality: Beyond music as an epiphenomenon of language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, E78. doi:10.1017/S0140525X20001211

Friday, October 01, 2021

Does music have evolutionary origins?

Figure R1 from Savage et al. (2021)*

Recently a special issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences came out, dedicated to the topic of music and evolution. Two target articles and 60 commentaries (on these target articles) by 109 experts reveal the current and complex debate about the origins of music. This debate is nicely depicted in Figure R1 (see left), showing a wide spread of positions with regard to both target articles.*

Personally, I'm really happy with this special issue and the effort that the authors of both target papers put in formulating their ideas and responded to the commentaries. It will hopefully give another boost to the scientific study of music/ality and its origins!

Nevertheless, in my commentary, I note that both proposals focus on overt musical behavior and largely ignore the role of perception and cognition. Furthermore, both articles blur the boundaries between the potential origins of language and music. It invites for an alternative approach, and concludes that the research focus should be on what makes the capacity for music distinct from that of language. For details see Honing (2021).

Honing, H. (2021). Unravelling the origins of musicality: Beyond music as an epiphenomenon of language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, E78. doi:10.1017/S0140525X20001211

Mehr, S., Krasnow, M., Bryant, G., & Hagen, E. (2021). Toward a productive evolutionary understanding of music. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, E122. doi:10.1017/S0140525X21000030

Savage, P., Loui, P., Tarr, B., Schachner, A., Glowacki, L., Mithen, S., & Fitch, W. (2021). Toward inclusive theories of the evolution of musicality. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, E121. doi:10.1017/S0140525X21000042

*Software use to generate the Figure (an informal rating of two of the authors) can be found here.

Tuesday, July 27, 2021

Cheesecake voor de oren? [Dutch]

Beeld Astrid Anna van Rooij.
 


Muziekliefhebbers mogen tot hun grote vreugde eindelijk weer naar concerten en festivals. Maar waarom genieten we eigenlijk zo van trillende lucht? En heeft dat ook ‘nut’? De vier belangrijkste ideeën gewogen. 

Een artikel geschreven door Niels Waarlo (Volkskrant).

"Kippevel, niet kunnen stilstaan, zelfs tranen in de ogen: breng de lucht op de juiste frequenties aan het trillen en mensen kunnen heftig reageren. En dat heeft verder geen enkel nut, menen sommige wetenschappers. Of, zoals psycholoog en filosoof William James in 1890 al schreef: ‘Muziek is louter een bijkomstigheid van het hebben van een gehoororgaan.’ 

De beroemde Canadese psycholoog Steven Pinker vergeleek muziek in de jaren negentig met cheesecake. Mensen zijn geëvolueerd om voedzame suikers en vetten lekker te vinden vanwege de voedzaamheid, als gevolg daarvan is cheesecake nu in trek. Dat betekent niet dat cheesecake zelf een rol speelde in de evolutie, schreef hij.  

Zo zou het ook met muziek zijn. Die kietelt het brein door een samenkomst van allerlei andere vermogens om geluiden te verwerken, taal te begrijpen en patronen te herkennen. De mensheid zonder muziek is als de mensheid zonder cheesecake: jammer van de lekkernij, voor het voortbestaan van de soort maakt het geen verschil"

Lees het volledige artikel in de Volkskrant.

Friday, March 26, 2021

Thank Cod for Rock 'n Roll? [Dutch]


Houden we van bas dankzij ons evenwichtsorgaan? 

De wetenschap barst van wilde ideeën die nog onbewezen zijn. Maar hoe overtuigend zijn ze?

Deze week schrijft Ronald Veldhuizen in de Volkskrant over waarom we houden van dreunende basklanken. Dit naar aanleiding van Todd & Lee (2015), een terugblik op Todd's "wilde" theorie die hij in 2000 presenteerde op een conferentie met de titel "Thank Cod for Rock 'N Roll", en die elegant werd getest door Trainor et al. (2009), maar helaas nooit  werd gerepliceerd. 

Zie het artikel in de Volkskrant.

Todd, N. P. M., & Lee, C. S. (2015). The sensory-motor theory of rhythm and beat induction 20 years on: a new synthesis and future perspectives. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 444. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00444

Trainor, L. J., Gao, X., Lei, J. jiang, Lehtovaara, K., & Harris, L. R. (2009). The primal role of the vestibular system in determining musical rhythm. Cortex, 45(1), 35–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2007.10.014

Lenc, T., Keller, P. E., Varlet, M., & Nozaradan, S. (2018). Neural tracking of the musical beat is enhanced by low-frequency sounds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(32), 8221–8226. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1801421115

Saturday, January 30, 2021

Where did music come from?

Credit: Erikacarreraph/Shutersttock

Where Did Music Come From? Did humans evolve to sing and dance? Or did we invent our musical pastimes? Asks Cody Cottier in Discovery Magazine:

'Look anywhere and you’ll find music. Without a single exception, every culture produces some form of it. Like language, it’s a universal trait in our species, and over the millennia it has bloomed into a diverse and stunning global symphony. Yet its origin remains one of the great secrets of human history. 

The oldest known instruments are 42,000-year-old bone flutes discovered in caves in Germany. Vocal music surely predates these, but the problem, according to University of Amsterdam musicologist Henkjan Honing, “is that music doesn’t fossilize and our brains don’t fossilize.” With little hard evidence, scientists still debate what evolutionary purpose music serves. And because its purpose is obscure enough to warrant debate, some skeptics question whether it serves any purpose at all.'

Opening text of a recent article in Discovery Magazine.

Wednesday, June 17, 2020

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.

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

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.

Saturday, September 22, 2018

Music, explained?

"Music is everywhere. We hear it in our cars, in coffee shops, on TV, and at church. We use it to learn, remember, feel, celebrate, and connect. Every known human culture has had some form of music. But in the rest of the animal world, the ability to understand and create music is rare. Where humans might hear rhythm and melody, rhesus monkeys, for example, just hear noise. So what makes music so universal among humans? How does sound become something more? And how does it evoke such a wide range of emotions?"
Joe Posner of Vox tackled these questions in a recent episode of the Netflix' Explained series. See Music, explained (Episode 20) here.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

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:

Wednesday, March 01, 2017

Want to know more about human musicality?

Cover of The Scientist, Vol. 31, Issue 3 on Music
Some quotes from the March issue of The Scientist dedicated to the topic of music and musicality:
Music’s universality in humans, combined with its fundamental social and cultural roles, is convincing evidence to some that our musicality is adaptive.
Are musical tendencies the prod­uct of culture, or have they evolved along with our abilities to produce and process music?
If these properties are absent in some cultures, they can’t be strictly determined by something in the biology
See the full issue here.


Saturday, November 19, 2016

What makes us musical animals?

A pair of gibbons sing together (credit: Andrew Walmsley / NPL)
Exploring the biological and social processes that underly our musical abilities, Nancy Ferranti talks to music researcher Henkjan Honing about the origins of music and musical behaviours. The podcast was broadcasted this morning at CKUT, a campus-community radio station based at McGill University.



Friday, November 04, 2016

Is music a supernormal stimulus?

Fragment of an interview of Richard Dawkins with Steven Pinker for the documentary series The Genius of Charles Darwin (UK Channel 4 Television, 2008). Pinker explains again why music is not an adaptation, but should be seen as a kind of 'supernormal stimulus' - adding the phrase people in music hate this theory....



For a full one hour of uncut footage see here.

ResearchBlogging.orgHoning, H. (2011). Muziek is geen luxe... maar wat dan wel? Academische Boekengids, 88, 2-4.

ResearchBlogging.orgHoning, H. (2012). If music isn’t a luxury, what is it? Journal of Music, Technology and Education, 5 (1), 114-117 DOI: 10.1386/jmte.5.1.109_5

Monday, August 31, 2015

Evolutionair nut of zinloos tijdverdrijf? [Dutch]



Henkjan Honing (UvA) en Marc Leman (UGent) gaven een lezing in de Handelsbeurs in Gent en gingen daarna met Eos-redacteur Reinout Verbeke in gesprek. Voor meer fragmenten zie YouTube.

Monday, June 15, 2015

Can one trace the origins of musicality?

Update: the complete issue on Musicality (12 papers) is free to download in March 2015. See website Phil Trans B for details.

[Press release of the UvA; Dutch|English]

Why do we have music? And what enables us to perceive, appreciate and make music? The search for a possible answer to these and other questions forms the backdrop to a soon-to-be released theme issue of Philosophical Transactions, which deals with the subject of musicality. An initiative of Henkjan Honing, professor of Music Cognition at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), this theme issue will see Honing and fellow researchers present their most important empirical results and offer a joint research agenda with which to identify the biological and cognitive basis of musicality.

Researchers have long been wary of the notion that music might have a biological basis. Music was originally viewed as a cultural artifact and as something that in evolutionary terms has existed for too short a period to have shaped human perception and cognition. The question is whether it is at all possible to gain insight into the evolution of cognition, and by extension music cognition. Sceptics argue that the necessary proof will never be found because cognition doesn't fossilise (i.e. it is impossible to obtain the requisite evidence).

Music or musicality?
Honing, who is the driving force behind the theme issue, argues that the origin of musicality can most definitely be discovered by using a bottom-up approach in which one looks for the basic mechanisms that combine into a complex trait – in this case musicality. Honing: 'Many studies on the biological origin of music are centred on the question of how to define music. This raises the question, for example, whether birdsong and the song structure of humpback whales can be considered music. To address such issues effectively, however, it is important to distinguish between the notions of music and musicality. Musicality in all its complexity can be defined as a natural, spontaneously developing set of traits based on and constrained by our cognitive and biological system. Music in all its variety can be defined as a social and cultural construct based on that very musicality. This distinction allows us to search for the different constituent aspects that form the basis for the phenotype musicality.'

This bottom-up strategy serves as the starting point for a new research agenda that has been drawn up by Honing and a consortium of international experts from a wide range of disciplines, including musicology, computational cognition, anthropology and psychology. According to Honing, such a 'multicomponent' perspective on musicality will help to emphasise the latter's constituent capacities, development and neural cognitive specificity, and will throw light on the origins and evolution of musical behaviour.

Bringing together global expertise
The forthcoming theme issue of Philosophical Transactions is a direct result of a Distinguished Lorentz Fellowship that was awarded to Honing last year by the Lorentz Center and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS). This fellowship allowed Honing to bring together over twenty internationally renowned experts from the fields of cognition, biology and musicality. The theme issue will contain 11 articles on topics such as the biological basis for individual differences in musicality, the origins of musicality across species, and the principles of structure building in music, language and animal song.

The world's oldest scientific journal
As the world's longest-running scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society – which this year celebrates its 350th anniversary – publishes high-quality theme issues on topics of current importance and general interest within the life sciences. Some of its most notable contributors have included Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton and, more recently, Stephen Hawking.




ResearchBlogging.orgHoning, H., ten Cate, C., Peretz, I., & Trehub, S. (2015). Without it no music: cognition, biology and evolution of musicality Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370 (1664), 20140088-20140088 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0088

ResearchBlogging.orgGingras, B., Honing, H., Peretz, I., Trainor, L., & Fisher, S. (2015). Defining the biological bases of individual differences in musicality Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370 (1664), 20140092-20140092 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0092

ResearchBlogging.orgFitch, W. (2015). Four principles of bio-musicology Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370 (1664), 20140091-20140091 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0091

ResearchBlogging.org Hoeschele, M., Merchant, H., Kikuchi, Y., Hattori, Y., & ten Cate, C. (2015). Searching for the origins of musicality across species Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370 (1664), 20140094-20140094 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0094

The complete theme issue (12 papers) can be found here.

Monday, January 26, 2015

Without it no music?

Cover picture of the March issue of  Philosophical Transactions B.

A short entry to announce a theme issue on Musicality in Philosophical Transactions B (celebrating this year its 350th anniversary). Online 2 February 2015 and in print on 19 March 2015.

ResearchBlogging.orgHoning H, ten Cate C, Peretz I, & Trehub SE (2015, in press). Without it no music: cognition, biology and evolution of musicality Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 370 (1664). 10.1098/rstb.2014.0088

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Difference between the GAE and VL hypothesis?

Summary diagrams of vocal systems in songbirds, humans, monkeys, and mice. 
(Figure 1 from Petkov & Jarvis in Ackermann et al., 2014).

Today a commentary was published in BBS in which the gradual audiomotor evolution (GAE) hypothesis (Honing & Merchant, 2014) is proposed as an alternative interpretation to the auditory timing mechanisms discussed in the target article by Ackermann et al. (2014).

While often a link is made between vocal learning (VL) and a species' auditory timing skills (e.g., 'entrainment'), the GAE and VL hypotheses show the following crucial differences.

First, the GAE hypothesis does not claim that the neural circuit that is engaged in rhythmic entrainment is deeply linked to vocal perception, production, and learning, even if some overlap between the circuits exists.

Second, the GAE hypothesis suggests that rhythmic entrainment could have developed through a gradient of anatomofunctional changes on the interval-based mechanism to generate an additional beat-based mechanism, instead of claiming a categorical jump from non-rhythmic/single-interval to rhythmic entrainment/multiple-interval abilities.

Third, since the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic (CBGT) circuit has been involved in beat-based mechanisms in imaging studies, we suggest that the reverberant flow of audiomotor information that loops across the anterior pre-frontal CBGT circuits may be the underpinning of human rhythmic entrainment.

Finally, the GAE hypothesis suggests that the integration of sensorimotor information throughout the mCBGT circuit and other brain areas during the perception or execution of single intervals is similar in human and nonhuman primates.

ResearchBlogging.orgAckermann, H., Hage, S., & Ziegler, W. (2014). Brain mechanisms of acoustic communication in humans and nonhuman primates: An evolutionary perspective Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1-84 DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X13003099
 
ResearchBlogging.orgHoning, H., & Merchant, H. (2014). Differences in auditory timing between human and non-human primates. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27(6), 557-558 DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X13004056. [Alternative link: http://www.mcg.uva.nl/papers/Honing-Merchant-2014.pdf ]
 
ResearchBlogging.orgMerchant, H., & Honing, H. (2014). Are non-human primates capable of rhythmic entrainment? Evidence for the gradual audiomotor evolution hypothesis. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 7 (274) 1-8. doi 10.3389/fnins.2013.00274 

Friday, December 05, 2014

Hebben dieren ook muzikaal gevoel? (5/5) [Dutch]



Ken je Snowball al? De witte kakatoe dansend op de Backstreet Boys? Of Ronan, de headbangende zeeleeuw? Deze dieren lijken zeker maatgevoel te hebben. Is muzikaliteit dan niet alleen uniek bij de mens? Wat zegt dat over muziek in relatie tot onze evolutionaire ontwikkeling?Een college over het belang van onderzoek naar muziekcognitie in biologie.

Voor de andere lezingen zie hier.

Bronnen:

00:30 Mampe et al. (2009)
04:00 Honing (2012); Honing et al.(2014)
05:30 Winkler et al. (2009)
06:30 Honing et al. (2012)
11:00 Patel et al. (2009)
12:30 Cook et al. (2013)
15:00 Honing et al. (2015, in press)

 ResearchBlogging.orgMampe B, Friederici AD, Christophe A, & Wermke K (2009). Newborns' cry melody is shaped by their native language. Current biology : CB, 19 (23), 1994-7 PMID: 19896378
 
ResearchBlogging.orgHoning, H. (2012). Without it no music: beat induction as a fundamental musical trait Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1252 (1), 85-91 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06402.x
 
ResearchBlogging.orgHoning H, Bouwer FL, & Háden GP (2014). Perceiving Temporal Regularity in Music: The Role of Auditory Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) in Probing Beat Perception. Advances in experimental medicine and biology, 829, 305-23 PMID: 25358717
  
ResearchBlogging.orgWinkler I, Háden GP, Ladinig O, Sziller I, & Honing H (2009). Newborn infants detect the beat in music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106 (7), 2468-71 PMID: 19171894
 
ResearchBlogging.orgPatel AD, Iversen JR, Bregman MR, & Schulz I (2009). Experimental evidence for synchronization to a musical beat in a nonhuman animal. Current biology : CB, 19 (10), 827-30 PMID: 19409790
 
ResearchBlogging.orgCook, P., Rouse, A., Wilson, M., & Reichmuth, C. (2013). A California sea lion (Zalophus californianus) can keep the beat: Motor entrainment to rhythmic auditory stimuli in a non vocal mimic. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 127 (4), 412-427 DOI: 10.1037/a0032345
 
ResearchBlogging.org Honing, H., ten Cate, C., Peretz, I., & Trehub, S. (February 2015, in press). Without it no music: Cognition, biology, and evolution of musicality. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Theme Issue on Musicality.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

What do we share with other primates in terms of cognition?

Below a beautiful summary of the recent literature on the neurobiology of action imitation/understanding, language, and rhythmic processing/auditory timing (Mendoza & Merchant, in press). The neural circuitry that is thought to be involved in all three higher cognitive functions is shown here for three closely related primates: the macaque monkey, chimpanzee and human brain.

Schematic representation of the neural circuits for action imitation/understanding, language, and rhythmic processing in three closely related primates. Upper, middle and lower panels adapted from Hecht et al. (2013a), Rilling et al. (2008) and Merchant and Honing (2014), respectively.
(In turn, adapted from Mendoza & Merchant, in press.)

For me, and several other researchers in the field of rhythm cognition, the bottom panel is the most intriguing. It addresses the question in how far we share rhythm cognition with other primates.

Quite a few papers on this topic came out recently (I cite a small selection below). One of the teasing questions is the absence/presence of a bidirectional link between IPL (inferior parietal lobe) and MPC (medial premotor cortex), a link that quite a few researchers suspect is crucial to regularity detection or rhythmic entrainment in sound and music, and arguably should be considered a basic building block of musicality.

ResearchBlogging.orgAckermann, H., et al. (2014, in press). Brain mechanisms of acoustic communication in humans and nonhuman primates: An evolutionary perspective. Behavioral and Brain Science.

ResearchBlogging.orgHoning, H., & Merchant, H. (2014, in press). Differences in auditory timing between human and non-human primates. Behavioral and Brain Science.

ResearchBlogging.org Mendoza, G., Merchant, H. (2014). Motor system evolution and the emergence of high cognitive functions Progress in Neurobiology DOI: 10.1016/j.pneurobio.2014.09.001
 
ResearchBlogging.orgMerchant, H., & Honing, H. (2014; online). Are non-human primates capable of rhythmic entrainment? Evidence for the gradual audiomotor evolution hypothesis. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 7 (274) 1-8. doi 10.3389/fnins.2013.00274

 ResearchBlogging.orgPatel, A., & Iversen, J. (2014). The evolutionary neuroscience of musical beat perception: the Action Simulation for Auditory Prediction (ASAP) hypothesis Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 8 DOI: 10.3389/fnsys.2014.00057