Does musicality have a biological basis?

Participants of the Adacemy Colloquium on Musicality and Genomics, held on 20 and 21 June 2019 at the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam | © www.miletteraats.nl

While there is still quite some debate on the cultural and biological origins of music, there is a growing consensus that musicality has deep biological foundations, based on an accumulation of evidence for the involvement of genetic variation. Recent advances in molecular technologies provide an effective way of investigating these biological foundations. In particular, genome-wide genotyping offers a promising route to capture the polymorphic content of large phenotyped population samples. These approaches provide complementary evidence to recent knowledge gained from examining clustering in families and co-occurrence in twins of extreme levels of musical ability. However, the success of molecular genetic studies of musical ability is critically dependent on robust, objective, and reliable measures of musicality phenotypes. 

The colloquium, that was held on 20 and 21 June 2019 in Amsterdam, aimed to 1) evaluate existing measures of musicality, such as the GOLD-MSI, PROMS, AMMA, MET, Karma, Seashore, etc., and 2) discuss the opportunities to administer these standardized aptitude tests online on a large scale, especially using web-based and engaging gaming techniques. The latter will provide an important step towards 3) the design of high-powered genome-wide screens to be able to effectively analyse musical phenotypes (Gingras,Honing, Peretz, Trainor, & Fisher, 2018). Lastly, 4) a key goal was to initiate an international and truly interdisciplinary consortium aimed at identifying the genetic bases of musicality. More information can be found at www.mcg.uva.nl/musicality2019/.

Interested in becoming an SA at MCG?

www.mcg.uva.nl

The Music Cognition Group (MCG) searches for an enthusiastic and well-organized student assistant / P.A. acting as a first point of contact with people from both inside and outside MCG, starting 1 August 2019 (1 y, 0.2 fte). Deadline for applications is 15 June 2019.

N.B. You have to be registered as a bachelor or master student at the University of Amsterdam (UvA).

For more information, and detailed instructions on how to apply, see here.

In search of the origins of musicality?

This week, George Miller in the Hedgehog and the Fox investigates the origins of human musicality by looking for musical ability and perception in other animals, including rhesus macaques, zebra finches, a cockatoo named Snowball, and Ronan, a headbanging California sea lion. Miller's guide to the Evolving Animal Orchestra, is Henkjan Honing, professor of music cognition at the University of Amsterdam.



Honing’s book is not about the origins of music, but the structure of musicality, that collection of attributes that enable us to make and appreciate music, such as perception of a regular beat or the ability to imitate a melody. If such traits are based on our cognitive abilities and biological predispositions, it makes sense to look for them in other animals. All sorts of fascinating hypotheses then open up: if musicality is a sensitivity that humans share with many non-human species, it may have preceded the development of music and of language, but enabled both.

Interested in the biological basis of music and musicality?

Lecture room at KNAW.

Get inspired during a masterclass on Musicality and Genetics that will be held at the KNAW - Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen on Wednesday 19 June 2019 in Amsterdam.

Register soon, and submit your abstract here, before May 15, 2019.

www.mcg.uva.nl/musicality2019

Is beat perception special?

Fleur Bouwer wonders. Behaviorally, temporal expectations seem to facilitate processing of events at expected time points, such as sounds that coincide with the beat in musical rhythm. Yet, temporal expectations can develop based on different forms of structure in the environment, not just the regularity afforded by a musical beat. Because still little is known about how different types of temporal expectations are neurally implemented and affect performance, she orthogonally manipulated the periodicity and predictability of rhythmic sequences to examine the mechanisms underlying beat-based and memory-based temporal expectations. The results are now accessible via BioRxiv.

Since when is music a topic for biologists?

mitpress.mit.edu

Below the opening of a recent book review of The Evolving Animal Orchestra in Current Biology by Andrea Ravignani:

"Music is traditionally regarded as ‘intellectual property’ of the arts, humanities, and perhaps social sciences. Since when is music a topic for biologists? While Darwin and other naturalists had noticed crossspecies similarities to human musical behaviors, realizing the importance of musicality has contributed enormously to linking music and biology. In fact, while music is more of a cultural product, musicality denotes the neurobiological predispositions an organism uses to produce and process music. Henkjan Honing’s new book The Evolving Animal Orchestra: In Search of What Makes Us Musical is not about animals listening to human music or the like. It is a journey through cross-species musicality — that is, the neurobiology underlying musical behaviors in humans and other animals"

See the full review here.

Can all animals keep the beat?

Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

Darwin believed in the musicality of animals. The truth may be more interesting, says Simon Ings in the NewScientist of 3 April 2019:

"THE perception, if not the enjoyment, of musical cadences and of rhythm," wrote Darwin in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, "is probably common to all animals."

Henkjan Honing has tested this eminently reasonable idea, and in his book, The Evolving Animal Orchestra, he reports back. He details his disappointment, frustration and downright failure with such wit, humility and a love of the chase that any young person reading it will surely want to run away to become a cognitive scientist.

No culture has yet been found that doesn't have music, and all music shares certain universal characteristics: melodies composed of seven or fewer discrete pitches; a regular beat; a limited sequence of rhythmic patterns. All this would suggest a biological basis for musicality.

A bird flies with regular beats of its wings. Animals walk with a particular rhythm. So you might expect beat perception to be present in everything that doesn't want to falter when moving. But it isn't. Honing describes experiments that demonstrate conclusively that we are the only primates with a sense of rhythm, possibly deriving from advanced beat perception.

Only strongly social animals, he writes, from songbirds and parrots to elephants and humans, have beat perception. What if musicality was acquired by all prosocial species through a process of convergent evolution? Like some other cognitive scientists, Honing now wonders whether language might derive from music, in a similar way to how reading uses much older neural structures that recognise contrast and sharp corners.

Honing must now test this exciting hypothesis. And if The Evolving Animal Orchestra is how he responds to disappointment, I can't wait to see what he makes of success." – Simon Ings (NewScientist).

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.

Interested in the biology of musicality?

This June in Amsterdam, leading experts from diverse fields meet to explore how advances in genomics can give insights into the biology of musicality. The KNAW Colloquium is preceded by a Masterclass (June 19), now open for applications. Spread the word!

Young researchers, PhD-students, and master students in the fields of music cognition, psychology, and genetics are cordially invited to join our Master Class on 'Musicality and Genomics': See http://www.mcg.uva.nl/musicality2019/masterclass.html.

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.