[Based on a BBC news item released yesterday:] Researchers have identified what they say are the oldest-known musical instruments in the world. The flutes, made from bird bone and mammoth ivory, come from a cave in southern Germany which contains early evidence for the occupation of Europe by modern humans - Homo sapiens. Scientists used carbon dating to show that the flutes were between 42,000 and 43,000 years old.
A team led by Tom Higham at Oxford University dated animal bones in the same ground layers as the flutes at Geissenkloesterle Cave in Germany's Swabian Jura. Nick Conard, the Tuebingen University researcher, who published in 2009 about the then earliest flute, was excavator at the site.
Higham, T., Basell, L., Jacobi, R., Wood, R., Ramsey, C., & Conard, N. (2012). Τesting models for the beginnings of the Aurignacian and the advent of figurative art and music: The radiocarbon chronology of Geißenklösterle Journal of Human Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2012.03.003
From 29 May 2012 through 1 Jun 2012 at The Lorentz Center in Leiden the workshop Core Knowledge, Language and Culture will be held.
This workshop will address the relation between core knowledge, language, music, and culture, with a view to assessing the current understanding of these questions for a theory of the mind/brain. We hope that the participants – scholars from fields as diverse as psychology, linguistics, neurobiology, neurolinguistics, music cognition, and cognitive anthropology – will contribute to defining a research program that may address both new and as yet unresolved research questions in this area.
To give one example, it is puzzling that a notion such as recursion (and the cognate notions of Merge or successor function) seems to play a role in apparently unrelated domains such as number/arithmetics, language, and music. Both linguistic and nonlinguistic quantification seem to be built on shared primitives. Such issues are often related to the (dis)similarity or (dis)continuity between the animal and the human domain. The question arises whether core knowledge of number constitutes an intriguing exception to the discontinuity thesis, with potential ramifications for the representation of time and space in the spirit of Kant.
The organizers of the workshop will be pleased to facilitate an open and fruitful debate on these topics. See for more information the Lorentz Center website.
For various reasons the song of songbirds are currently considered to be the closest animal analogue to language. This raises questions about to what extent particular perceptual and cognitive abilities that are considered to be closely linked to the production, perception and learning of language are present in songbirds. In an upcoming SMART-Talk at the University of Amsterdam on Friday 25 May 2012, Prof. dr Carel ten Cate (Leiden University) will address two of such abilities.
One concerns speech perception: is the ability to distinguish specific speech sound contrasts strictly human or also present in birds? The other one concerns the ability for detecting and learning particular grammar rules, using the paradigm of artificial grammars: what is the level of complexity that birds can cope with? These findings in birds will be related to those obtained in other animal species.
ten Cate, C., Verzijden, M., & Etman, E. (2006). Sexual Imprinting Can Induce Sexual Preferences for Exaggerated Parental Traits Current Biology, 16 (11), 1128-1132 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2006.03.068
Dan Levitin (McGill University) recently started a new website Music Cognition U., a Resource Center that is supported through a grant from The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
The website is designed and maintained by a group of music cognition research scientists to communicate the latest findings to the public, to students, public policy makers, and other researchers. It is also a place for people to communicate, comment, and share their experiences and thoughts about music with one another and the research community.
On Thursday 24 May 2012, 11.00 – 12.30 there wil be a seminar at NIAS Campus on the Horizon research project Knowledge and Culture that was recently submitted to NWO for funding. In this project, we intend to study the relationship between innate cognitive capacities that are not specific for humans, so-called core knowledge systems, and innate cognitive capacities that are uniquely human, such as language and music.
Numbers (by Johan Rooryck)
The core knowledge system for number, for instance, has been argued to contain two nonverbal subsystems that are present in both newborn infants and animals. The Approximate Number System (ANS) compares the numerosities of distinct sets without individuating their members. The Object Tracking System (OTS) yields representations of small numbers of objects, i.e. 1 to 3 (perhaps 4), and does not work on sets larger than 4. Linguistic evidence suggests that the split between OTS and ANS is reflected in the language system, and that children acquire numbers in a sequence.
Music (by Henkjan Honing)
We have known for some time that babies possess a keen perceptual sensitivity for the melodic, rhythmic and dynamic aspects of speech and music: aspects that linguists are inclined to categorize under the term ‘prosody’, but which are in fact the building blocks of music. Only much later in a child’s development does he make use of this ‘musical prosody’, for instance in delineating and subsequently recognizing word boundaries. Henkjan Honing will make a case for ‘illiterate listening’, the human ability to discern, interpret and appreciate musical nuances already from day one, long before a single word has been uttered, let alone conceived. It is the preverbal and preliterate stage that is dominated by musical listening.
The lecture is followed by an open discussion.
Johan Rooryck is the Distinguished Lorentz Fellow 2011/12, and Henkjan Honing holds a KNAW-Hendrik Muller Chair in Music Cognition and is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Musicology at the University of Amsterdam.
The Lyon Neuroscience Research Center is seeking applicants for a 2-year post-doctoral position that integrates into our research project on congenital amusia funded by the French National Agency of Research. The post-doctoral researcher will work with Barbara Tillmann (Auditory Cognition and Psychoacoustics team) and Anne Caclin (Brain Dynamics and Cognition team) at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, and will conduct behavioral and EEG/MEG experiments investigating the cognitive and neural correlates of this musical deficit.
The conference entitled The Neurosciences and Music-IV: Learning and Memory was held at the University of Edinburgh from June 9–12, 2011, jointly hosted by the Mariani Foundation and the Institute for Music in Human and Social Development, and involving nearly 500 international delegates. Two opening workshops, three large and vibrant poster sessions, and nine invited symposia introduced a diverse range of recent research findings and discussed current research directions. In the reference below (Altenmüller et al., 2012), the proceedings are introduced by the workshop and symposia leaders on topics including working with children, rhythm perception, language processing, cultural learning, memory, musical imagery, neural plasticity, stroke rehabilitation, autism, and amusia. The rich diversity of the interdisciplinary research presented suggests that the future of music neuroscience looks both exciting and promising, and that important implications for music rehabilitation and therapy are being discovered.
Altenmüller, E., Demorest, S., Fujioka, T., Halpern, A., Hannon, E., Loui, P., Majno, M., Oechslin, M., Osborne, N., Overy, K., Palmer, C., Peretz, I., Pfordresher, P., Särkämö, T., Wan, C., & Zatorre, R. (2012). Introduction to The Neurosciences and Music IV: Learning and Memory Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1252 (1), 1-16 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2012.06474.x
Honing, 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
It’s a well-known phenomenon in the media: once you've contributed to a radio or tv program on a compelling, general interest question, journalists will return to you with the same question over and over again, and, basically, wanting you to redo the same answer.
It happened to me a few years ago when I was asked to contribute to a Dutch TV item on the question why some melodies stick in your mind. My first answer was: we do not know. Simply because if we knew, an ‘earworm’-generating computer program would exist that can generate melodies that are guaranteed to stick in people’s mind for days. In this case I’m sure nobody would mind.
But unfortunately for science, now —five years later— we still do not know what is the nature of this phenomenon.
What we do know —mainly from questionnaire-style research— is that most people suffer from the ‘earworm’ phenomenon (also referred to as brainworm, cognitive itch, or musical imagery repetition), females slightly more than males. And that the tunes that spontaneously pop-up in one’s mind are generally not the most striking compositions. Actually, they are commonly reported as being simply irritating.
Why does this happen? And what does it tells us about our cognition? And why does it happen with music, and significantly less with text or images? What is in the musical structure of that particular fragment that makes it spontaneously pop-up from memory?
We simply do not know.
Vicky Williamson
Luckily some researchers have been successful in convincing their funding agencies that these are interesting and pressing questions. A recent example is Vicky Williamson, who, in collaboration with Lauren Stewart from Goldsmiths, University of London, succeeded in securing a grant to seriously look into this phenomenon. See a recent radio interview below. And if you are interested in contributing to their research: they still look for PhD candidates.
N.B. In Amsterdam we will start investigating earworms as well, in a project named COGITCH* — a collaboration between Utrecht University, University of Amsterdam, Sound & Vision, Radio 5 and Meertens Institute. We will be developing a web-based environment, so-called ITCH environment (Identification, Tagging and Characterization of Hooks) to obtain large amounts of judgments from the lay audience on what makes a fragment of music easy recognizable and/or stick in one’s mind. More on this later this year.
* A cognitive itch refers to an ‘earworm’, a fragment of music that you can’t get out of your head.
Honing, H. (2010). Lure(d) into listening: The potential of
cognition-based music information retrieval. Empirical Musicology
Review, 5(4), 121-126.
Yesterday, Tecumseh Fitch — presenting at the SMART Lecture Series of the University of Amsterdam — discussed the likelihood of the sexual selection hypothesis; Darwin’s first guess of why we might have music. Fitch argued that virtually all the available empirical evidence is against that hypothesis, including a recent study by his own group that will come out in PLoS One. And I simply agree (see earlier blogs).
Nevertheless, Geoffrey Miller, author of The Mating Mind, took up Darwin's first guess* and argued that music is one of the things humans successfully use to impress the other. This week Gary Marcus (New York University) and Geoffrey Miller (University of New Mexico) had a discussion on this issue in The Atlantic. You can read it here.
* Darwin had one other suggestion in the 11 pages he wrote on the possible origins of music, but that's a story for another blog.
Blute, M. (2003). [Book Review: The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature] The Quarterly Review of Biology, 78 (1), 129-130 DOI: 10.1086/377917
Darwin, G. (1871) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.London: Murray (p. 878).
De 12e Van Foreest publiekslezing wordt
gehouden in de Grote Kerk in Alkmaar
[Uit het programmaboekje van de 12e Van Foreest Publiekslezing]
Wat moet je weten, kunnen of waarderen om muzikaal te zijn? In de afgelopen jaren zijn we daar in het vakgebied muziekcognitie veel over te weten gekomen. En ik zal daar in deze lezing diverse voorbeelden van geven. Maar de lezing zal vooral gaan over een zoektocht die ik pas recentelijk begonnen ben: onderzoek met als doel niet alleen de vraag te beantwoorden wat muzikaliteit is, maar ook de vraag in hoeverre we muzikaliteit delen met andere dieren, om er zo achter te komen wat is er nodig is om muziek te laten ontstaan. Na jaren lang met name de methoden en technieken uit de psychologie en de informatica gebruikt te hebben om muziek te bestuderen, heb ik de laatste tijd met regelmaat gegluurd tussen de gordijnen van de evolutionaire psychologie en de neurobiologie. Dit met de vraag: wat is er te zeggen over de oorsprong van muziek en muzikaliteit vanuit een biologisch en evolutionair perspectief? In deze lezing zal ik verslag doen. Een bij tijd en wijle letterlijk verslag van een recent ingezet onderzoeksprogramma, een programma waarvan niet meer dan enkele contouren in zicht waren toen ik begon met schrijven. Ik hoop dan ook maar dat de aanwezigen het leuk vinden om mee te gluren. Maar ik hoop ook dat zij niet teleurgesteld zullen zijn als er aan het eind van de lezing geen sluitend antwoord is. Het blijft natuurlijk wetenschap. En dat gaat stapje voor stapje, en niet per definitie in de juiste richting. Voor meer informatie zie hier.
Higham, T., Basell, L., Jacobi, R., Wood, R., Ramsey, C., & Conard, N. (2012). Τesting models for the beginnings of the Aurignacian and the advent of figurative art and music: The radiocarbon chronology of Geißenklösterle Journal of Human Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2012.03.003
