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La musicalité est-elle un héritage de notre histoire biologique ?: Une approche comparative et multidisciplinaire

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Imitation, both gestural and vocal, has been acknowledged to be at the origin of human communication (Donald, 1991). Music is often considered to be the first means of communication of emotion via both vocal and gestural synchronization (Malloch, 1999; Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009). Instrumental music is part of the human heritage for more than 35000 years before our era (Aimé, Le Covec, Bovet & Esseily, 2020). However, very little is known about the acquisition of gestures that produce sounds (i.e. musical gestures) and their role in the development of music and musicality. In the present paper, we propose that studying early synchronous imitation of musical gestures is essential both for investigating the development of the early action–perception system and for outlining early music interventions during infancy. We designed double musical objects which can be used in preschool music education for prompting synchronic imitation of musical gestures between adult and child, and between dyads of infants. We conclude by proposing a novel pedagogical perspective in music education for the early years which links the privileged orientation of infants and children towards sound discoveries with the development of perception-action coupling via imitation of musical gestures.
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All human societies have music with a rhythmic “beat,” typically produced with percussive instruments such as drums. The set of capacities that allows humans to produce and perceive music appears to be deeply rooted in human biology, but an understanding of its evolutionary origins requires cross-taxa comparisons. We show that drumming by palm cockatoos (Probosciger aterrimus) shares the key rudiments of human instrumental music, including manufacture of a sound tool, performance in a consistent context, regular beat production, repeated components, and individual styles. Over 131 drumming sequences produced by 18 males, the beats occurred at nonrandom, regular intervals, yet individual males differed significantly in the shape parameters describing the distribution of their beat patterns, indicating individual drumming styles. Autocorrelation analyses of the longest drumming sequences further showed that they were highly regular and predictable like human music. These discoveries provide a rare comparative perspective on the evolution of rhythmicity and instrumental music in our own species, and show that a preference for a regular beat can have other origins before being co-opted into group-based music and dance.
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A variety of parrot species have recently gained attention as members of a small group of non-human animals that are capable of coordinating their movements in time with a rhythmic pulse. This capacity is highly developed in humans, who display unparalleled sensitivity to musical beats and appear to prefer rhythmically organized sounds in their music. Do parrots also exhibit a preference for rhythmic over arrhythmic sounds? Here, we presented humans and budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) – a small parrot species that have been shown to be able to align movements with a beat – with rhythmic and arrhythmic sound patterns in an acoustic place preference paradigm. Both species were allowed to explore an environment for 5 min. We quantified how much time they spent in proximity to rhythmic vs. arrhythmic stimuli. The results show that humans spent more time with rhythmic stimuli, and also preferred rhythmic stimuli when directly asked in a post-test survey. Budgerigars did not show any such overall preferences. However, further examination of the budgerigar results showed an effect of sex, such that male budgerigars spent more time with arrthymic stimuli, and female budgerigars spent more time with rhythmic stimuli. Our results support the idea that rhythmic information is interesting to budgerigars. We suggest that future investigations into the temporal characteristics of naturalistic social behaviors in budgerigars, such as courtship vocalizations and head-bobbing displays, may help explain the sex difference we observed.
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Music as an environmental aspect of professional workplaces has been closely studied with respect to consumer behavior while sparse attention has been given to its relevance for employee behavior. In this article, we focus on the influence of music upon cooperative behavior within decision-making groups. Based on results from two extended 20-round public goods experiments, we find that happy music significantly and positively influences cooperative behavior. We also find a significant positive association between mood and cooperative behavior. Consequently, while our studies provide partial support for the relevance of affect in relation to cooperation within groups, we also show an independently important function of happy music that fits with a theory of synchronous and rhythmic activity as a social lubricant. More generally, our findings indicate that music and perhaps other atmospheric variables that are designed to prime consumer behavior might have comparably important effects for employees and consequently warrant closer investigation. Copyright © 2016 The Authors Journal of Organizational Behavior Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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Previous research involving pre-school children and adults suggests that moving in synchrony with others can foster cooperation. Song provides a rich oscillatory framework that supports synchronous movement and may thus be considered a powerful agent of positive social relations. In the current study, we assessed this hypothesis in a group of primary-school aged children with diverse ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. Children participated in one of three activity conditions: group singing, group art, or competitive games. They were then asked to play a prisoner’s dilemma game as a measure of cooperation. Results showed that children who engaged in group singing were more cooperative than children who engaged in group art or competitive games.
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The ubiquity of songs is at odds with the prevailing view that music has no survival value (e.g., Granit, 1977; Winner, 1982). In particular, the widespread use of songs in child care (Trehub & Schellenberg, 1995) raises questions about their form and function, historically and cross-culturally, and their special link to caregiving. In the present review of singing to infants, we pursue two rather divergent approaches: one descriptive, the other empirical. The descriptive and historical material on songs, which is drawn primarily from anthropological and ethnomusicological sources, provides a context for the limited body of empirical research on songs for infants. Indeed, the descriptive evidence seems to suggest that the practice of singing to infants and many details of song form are rooted in ancient traditions that have survived industrialization and urbanization.
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According to classical sexual selection theory, complex multimodal courtship displays have evolved in males through female choice. While it is well-known that socially monogamous songbird males sing to attract females, we report here the first example of a multimodal dance display that is not a uniquely male trait in these birds. In the blue-capped cordon-bleu (Uraeginthus cyanocephalus), a socially monogamous songbird, both sexes perform courtship displays that are characterised by singing and simultaneous visual displays. By recording these displays with a high-speed video camera, we discovered that in addition to bobbing, their visual courtship display includes quite rapid step-dancing, which is assumed to produce vibrations and/or presumably non-vocal sounds. Dance performances did not differ between sexes but varied among individuals. Both male and female cordon-bleus intensified their dance performances when their mate was on the same perch. The multimodal (acoustic, visual, tactile) and multicomponent (vocal and non-vocal sounds) courtship display observed was a combination of several motor behaviours (singing, bobbing, stepping). The fact that both sexes of this socially monogamous songbird perform such a complex courtship display is a novel finding and suggests that the evolution of multimodal courtship display as an intersexual communication should be considered.
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Using recent regional brain activation/emotion models as a theoretical framework, we examined whether the pattern of regional EEG activity distinguished emotions induced by musical excerpts which were known to vary in affective valence (i.e., positive vs. negative) and intensity (i.e., intense vs. calm) in a group of undergraduates. We found that the pattern of asymmetrical frontal EEG activity distinguished valence of the musical excerpts. Subjects exhibited greater relative left frontal EEG activity to joy and happy musical excerpts and greater relative right frontal EEG activity to fear and sad musical excerpts. We also found that, although the pattern of frontal EEG asymmetry did not distinguish the intensity of the emotions, the pattern of overall frontal EEG activity did, with the amount of frontal activity decreasing from fear to joy to happy to sad excerpts. These data appear to be the first to distinguish valence and intensity of musical emotions on frontal electrocortical measures.
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Despite the quintessential role that music plays in human societies by enabling us to release and share emotions with others, traces of its evolutionary origins in other species remain scarce. Drumming like humans whilst producing music is practically unheard of in our most closely related species, the great apes. Although beating on tree roots and body parts does occur in these species, it has, musically speaking, little in common with human drumming. Researchers suggest that for manual beating in great apes to be compared to human drumming, it should at least be structurally even, a necessary quality to elicit entrainment (beat induction in others). Here we report an episode of spontaneous drumming by a captive chimpanzee that approaches the structural and contextual characteristics usually found in musical drumming. This drumming differs from most beating episodes reported in this species by its unusual duration, the lack of any obvious context, and rhythmical properties that include long-lasting and dynamically changing rhythms, but also evenness and leisureliness. This performance is probably the first evidence that our capacity to drum is shared with our closest relatives.
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Musical group interaction (MGI) is a complex social setting requiring certain cognitive skills that may also elicit shared psychological states. We argue that many MGI-specific features may also be important for emotional empathy, the ability to experience another person's emotional state. We thus hypothesized that long-term repeated participation in MGI could help enhance a capacity for emotional empathy even outside of the musical context, through a familiarization with and refinement of MGI empathy-promoting musical components (EPMCs). We tested this hypothesis by designing an MGI programme for primary school children consisting of interactive musical games implementing various EPMCs. We ran the programme for an entire school year and compared the emotional empathy of MGI children to control children using existing and novel measures of empathy before and after the programme. Our results support our hypothesis: MGI children showed higher emotional empathy scores after the study compared to its beginning, and higher scores than control children at the end of the study. These findings shed new light on the emotional processes involved in musical interaction and highlight the remarkable potential of MGI for promoting positive social-emotional capacities such as empathy.
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Music is a universal feature of human cultures, and it has both fascinated and troubled many researchers. In this paper we show through the dictator game (DG) that an individual’s listening to preferred “chill-inducing” music may promote altruistic behavior that extends beyond the bounds of kin selection or reciprocal altruism. Participants were 22 undergraduate and postgraduate students who were divided into two groups, the in-group and the out-group, and they acted as dictators. The dictators listened to their own preferred “chill-inducing” music, to music they disliked, or to silence, and then played the DG. In this hypothetical experiment, the dictators were given real money (which they did not keep) and were asked to distribute it to the recipients, who were presented as stylized images of men and women displayed on a computer screen. The dictators played the DG both before and after listening to the music. Both male and female dictators gave more money after listening to their preferred music and less after listening to the music they disliked, whereas silence had no effect on the allocated amounts. The group to which the recipient belonged did not influence these trends. The results suggest that listening to preferred “chill-inducing” music promotes altruistic behavior.
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A central goal of biomusicology is to understand the biological basis of human musicality. One approach to this problem has been to compare core components of human musicality (relative pitch perception, entrainment, etc.) with similar capacities in other animal species. Here we extend and clarify this comparative approach with respect to rhythm. First, whereas most comparisons between human music and animal acoustic behavior have focused on spectral properties (melody and harmony), we argue for the central importance of temporal properties, and propose that this domain is ripe for further comparative research. Second, whereas most rhythm research in non-human animals has examined animal timing in isolation, we consider how chorusing dynamics can shape individual timing, as in human music and dance, making group behavior key to understand the adaptive functions of rhythm. To illustrate the interdependence between individual and chorusing dynamics, we present a computational model of chorusing agents relating individual call timing with synchronous group behavior. Third, we distinguish and clarify mechanistic and functional explanations of rhythmic phenomena, often conflated in the literature, arguing that this distinction is key for understanding the evolution of musicality. Fourth, we expand biomusicological discussions beyond the species typically considered, providing an overview of chorusing and rhythmic behavior across a broad range of taxa (orthopterans, fireflies, frogs, birds, and primates). Finally, we propose an “Evolving Signal Timing” hypothesis, suggesting that similarities between timing abilities in biological species will be based on comparable chorusing behaviors. We conclude that the comparative study of chorusing species can provide important insights into the adaptive function(s) of rhythmic behavior in our “proto-musical” primate ancestors, and thus inform our understanding of the biology and evolution of rhythm in human music and language.
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Adults who move together to a shared musical beat synchronously as opposed to asynchronously are subsequently more likely to display prosocial behaviors toward each other. The development of musical behaviors during infancy has been described previously, but the social implications of such behaviors in infancy have been little studied. In Experiment 1, each of 48 14-month-old infants was held by an assistant and gently bounced to music while facing the experimenter, who bounced either in-synchrony or out-of-synchrony with the way the infant was bounced. The infants were then placed in a situation in which they had the opportunity to help the experimenter by handing objects to her that she had ‘accidently’ dropped. We found that 14-month-old infants were more likely to engage in altruistic behavior and help the experimenter after having been bounced to music in synchrony with her, compared to infants who were bounced to music asynchronously with her. The results of Experiment 2, using anti-phase bouncing, suggest that this is due to the contingency of the synchronous movements as opposed to movement symmetry. These findings support the hypothesis that interpersonal motor synchrony might be one key component of musical engagement that encourages social bonds among group members, and suggest that this motor synchrony to music may promote the very early development of altruistic behavior.
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The relative importance of nature and nurture for various forms of expertise has been intensely debated. Music proficiency is viewed as a general model for expertise, and associations between deliberate practice and music proficiency have been interpreted as supporting the prevailing idea that long-term deliberate practice inevitably results in increased music ability. Here, we examined the associations (rs = .18-.36) between music practice and music ability (rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination) in 10,500 Swedish twins. We found that music practice was substantially heritable (40%-70%). Associations between music practice and music ability were predominantly genetic, and, contrary to the causal hypothesis, nonshared environmental influences did not contribute. There was no difference in ability within monozygotic twin pairs differing in their amount of practice, so that when genetic predisposition was controlled for, more practice was no longer associated with better music skills. These findings suggest that music practice may not causally influence music ability and that genetic variation among individuals affects both ability and inclination to practice.
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Bird song has historically been considered an almost exclusively male trait, an observation fundamental to the formulation of Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Like other male ornaments, song is used by male songbirds to attract females and compete with rivals. Thus, bird song has become a textbook example of the power of sexual selection to lead to extreme neurological and behavioural sex differences. Here we present an extensive survey and ancestral state reconstruction of female song across songbirds showing that female song is present in 71% of surveyed species including 32 families, and that females sang in the common ancestor of modern songbirds. Our results reverse classical assumptions about the evolution of song and sex differences in birds. The challenge now is to identify whether sexual selection alone or broader processes, such as social or natural selection, best explain the evolution of elaborate traits in both sexes.
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An interest in producing sounds during play behaviour might be a forerunner for music. Thus, we explored object play behaviour involving sounds in cockatiels ( Nymphicus hollandicus ). We provided them with several objects producing sounds and recorded sound production, spontaneous warbles and drumming during breeding, pre- and post-breeding. Birds manipulated the objects in a playful way. They manipulated them less during breeding than during pre- and post-breeding, but the proportion of manipulations producing sounds were higher during post-breeding and breeding than during pre-breeding. Males manipulated the objects more frequently and produced more sounds than females. Youngsters manipulated the objects more than adults. One bird repeatedly put a bell on a xylophone; we discuss several possible explanations for the behaviour, including tool use. Only males warbled and drummed, and during breeding only. Our results suggest an enriching effect of the objects on the birds. Many aspects of musicality remain to be studied.
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We reviewed the literature up to March 2016 on the effects of nonmaternal voices on preterm infants’ clinical outcomes. Of the 11 studies that met the inclusion criteria, 10 focused on short‐term outcomes and one looked at long‐term effects. The studies mainly showed that vocal stimuli increased preterm infants’ stability in terms of heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation and behavioural measures. Improvements in feeding skills were also reported. The methods and the measures used in the studies were heterogeneous, making it difficult to draw reliable conclusions. Conclusion Vocal stimuli increased preterm infants’ stability, but further studies are needed.
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“Music is our oldest form of expression, older than language or art; it begins with the voice, and with our overwhelming need to reach out to others. In fact music is man far more than words, for words are abstract symbols which convey factual meaning. Music touches our feelings more deeply than words and makes us respond with our whole being.”
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Moving in synchrony with others encourages prosocial behavior. Adults who walk, sing, or tap together are later more likely to be cooperative, helpful, and rate each other as likeable. Our previous studies demonstrated that interpersonal synchrony encourages helpfulness even in 14-month-old infants. However, in those studies, infants always experienced interpersonal synchrony in a musical context. Here we investigated whether synchronous movement in a nonmusical context has similar effects on infant helpfulness. Fourteen-month-olds were bounced gently while the experimenter faced the infant and bounced with them either in- or out-of-synchrony. In contrast to our previous studies, instead of listening to music during this interpersonal movement phase while being bounced, infants listened to nonrhythmic nature sounds. We then tested infant prosociality directed toward the experimenter. Results showed that synchronous bouncing still encouraged more prosociality than asynchronous bouncing, despite the absence of music. However, helping was more delayed and fussiness rates were much higher than in our previous studies with music. Thus music may not be necessary for interpersonal synchrony to influence infant helpfulness, but the presence of music may act as a mood regulator or distractor to help keep infants happy and allow them to fully experience the effects of synchronous movement.
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Classical music has been shown to reduce stress in kennelled dogs; however, rapid habituation of dogs to this form of auditory enrichment has also been demonstrated. The current study investigated the physiological and behavioural response of kennelled dogs (n = 38) to medium-term (5 days) auditory enrichment with five different genres of music including Soft Rock, Motown, Pop, Reggae and Classical, to determine whether increasing the variety of auditory stimulation reduces the level of habituation to auditory enrichment. Dogs were found to spend significantly more time lying and significantly less time standing when music was played, regardless of genre. There was no observable effect of music on barking, however, dogs were significantly (z = 2.2, P < 0.05) more likely to bark following cessation of auditory enrichment. Heart Rate Variability (HRV) was significantly higher, indicative of decreased stress, when dogs were played Soft Rock and Reggae, with a lesser effect observed when Motown, Pop and Classical genres were played. Relative to the silent period prior to auditory enrichment, urinary cortisol:creatanine (UCCR) values were significantly higher during Soft Rock (t = 2.781, P < 0.01) and the second silent control period following auditory enrichment (t = 2.46, P < 0.05). Despite the mixed response to different genres, the physiological and behavioural changes observed remained constant over the 5d of enrichment suggesting that the effect of habituation may be reduced by increasing the variety of auditory enrichment provided.
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I argue that speech and language evolved through a series of stages individually designed to break through successive glass ceilings on group size. Language was simply the last of these (and hence evolved late in hominin evolution), but its precursors (laughter and singing) each played a crucial role in preparing the way for speech production.
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Music is present in every culture, but the degree to which it is shaped by biology remains debated. One widely discussed phenomenon is that some combinations of notes are perceived by Westerners as pleasant, or consonant, whereas others are perceived as unpleasant, or dissonant. The contrast between consonance and dissonance is central to Western music, and its origins have fascinated scholars since the ancient Greeks. Aesthetic responses to consonance are commonly assumed by scientists to have biological roots, and thus to be universally present in humans. Ethnomusicologists and composers, in contrast, have argued that consonance is a creation of Western musical culture. The issue has remained unresolved, partly because little is known about the extent of cross-cultural variation in consonance preferences. Here we report experiments with the Tsimane'-a native Amazonian society with minimal exposure to Western culture-and comparison populations in Bolivia and the United States that varied in exposure to Western music. Participants rated the pleasantness of sounds. Despite exhibiting Western-like discrimination abilities and Western-like aesthetic responses to familiar sounds and acoustic roughness, the Tsimane' rated consonant and dissonant chords and vocal harmonies as equally pleasant. By contrast, Bolivian city- and town-dwellers exhibited significant preferences for consonance, albeit to a lesser degree than US residents. The results indicate that consonance preferences can be absent in cultures sufficiently isolated from Western music, and are thus unlikely to reflect innate biases or exposure to harmonic natural sounds. The observed variation in preferences is presumably determined by exposure to musical harmony, suggesting that culture has a dominant role in shaping aesthetic responses to music.
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A most basic issue in the study of music perception is the question of why humans are motivated to pay attention to, or create, musical messages, and why they respond emotionally to them, when such messages seem to convey no real-time relevant biological information as do speech, animal utterances, and environmental sounds. Expanding on previous work (Roederer, 1979, 1982) three possibly concurrent factors will be examined: (1) The inborn motivation to train language-handling networks of the brain in the processing of simple, organized sound patterns as a prelude to the acquisition of language; (2) The need to extract the information contained in the “musical” components of speech; (3) The value of music as a means of transmitting information on emotional states and its effect in congregating and behaviorally equalizing masses of people. In the discussion, special attention will be paid to the role of motivation and emotion in auditory perception, to the fact that in humans limbic system functions can be activated by internally evoked images in complete detachment from the current state of environment and organism, and to the existence of two distinct strategies of cerebral information processing, namely short-term time sequencing, as required in speech communication and thinking, and holistic pattern recognition, as required in music perception. © 1983, Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Article
Interpersonal synchrony increases cooperation among adults, children, and infants. We tested whether increased infant helpfulness transfers to individuals uninvolved in the movement, but shown to be affiliates of a synchronously moving partner. Initially, 14-month-old infants (N = 48) watched a live skit by Experimenters 1 and 2 that either demonstrated affiliation or individuality. Infants in both groups were then randomly assigned to be bounced to music either synchronously or asynchronously with Experi- menter 1. Infant instrumental helpfulness toward Experimenter 2 was then measured. If the two experimenters were affiliates, infants from the synchronous movement condition were significantly more helpful toward Experimenter 2 than infants from the asynchronous movement condition. However, if the two experimenters were not affiliated, synchrony effects on prosociality did not transfer to Experimenter 2. These results show the importance of musical synchrony for social interaction and suggest that infants may use an understanding of third-party social relationships when directing their own social behaviors.
Article
Two studies investigated adults' use of prosodic emphasis to mark focused words in speech to infants and adults. In Experiment 1,18 mothers told a story to a 14-month-old infant and to an adult, using a picture book in which 6 target items were the focus of attention. Prosodic emphasis was measured both acoustically and subjectively. In speech to infants, mothers consistently positioned focused words on exaggerated pitch peaks in utterance-final position, whereas in speech to adults prosodic emphasis was more variable. In Experiment 2, 12 women taught another adult an assembly procedure involving familiar and novel terminology. In both studies, stressed words in adult-directed speech rarely coincided with pitch peaks. However, in infant-directed speech, mothers regularly used pitch prominence to convey primary stress. The use of exaggerated pitch peaks at the ends of utterances to mark focused words may facilitate speech processing for the infant.
Article
Adults and 9- to 11-month-old infants listened to repeated transpositions of either a prototypical Western melody that was based on the major triad or a nonprototypical Western melody that was based on the augmented triad. In both cases, the transpositions were either to related keys (standing in a 2:3 frequency ratio) or to unrelated keys (more complex frequency ratios). For the prototypical melody, both infants and adults more readily discriminated a change to the melody in the context of related keys. For the nonprototypical melody, infant listeners performed better in the context of related keys, but adult listeners performed worse. The findings indicate that the global context of auditory patterns influences the processing of pattem details for infant and adult listeners.
Article
If one stimulus pattern is transposed to another, and if the two are recognizably the same, then they are said to be perceptually invariant. Usually, transpositions that lead to perceptual invariance involve changes on a ratio scale between the stimuli comprising the two patterns. In this paper, we survey the literature with a view to the conditions of pitch structure (melody and harmony), spectral structure (timbre), intensity structure (loudness), and temporal structure (rhythm, meter, and tempo) that produce perceptual invariance. The review compares perceptual invariance for human infants, young children, and adults and nonhuman animals. For the most part, perceptual invariance holds at all levels of development and for all species throughout the acoustic dimensions surveyed. However, for melody perception, there is evidence that humans go through a stage in early childhood in which absolute (as distinguished from relative) pitch perception plays a role. Without doubt, absolute pitch is important in perception of serial acoustic (melodic) structures by animals. For both humans and nonhumans, melody perception appears to be governed by a hierarchy of perceptual strategies that includes both absolute and relative pitch. The survey suggests the value of a comparative perspective in understanding the perceptual principles underlying music perception in humans and the principles by which human infants and nonhuman animals process acoustic information.
Article
Although music is a universal feature of human culture, little is known about its origins and functions. A prominent theory of music evolution is the sexual selection hypothesis, which proposes that music evolved as a signal of genetic quality to potential mates. The sexual selection hypothesis offers several empirically testable predictions. First, musically skilled and active individuals should have greater mating success than less-skilled individuals. Second, if musical ability functions as an indicator of genetic quality, it is expected to be associated with other traits putatively related to genetic quality. Third, associations as per the first and second predictions are expected to be at least partly due to overlapping genetic influences. We tested these predictions in a large genetically informative sample of 10,975 Swedish twin individuals aged between 27 and 54 years (M = 40.1, SD = 7.7), using musical aptitude and music achievement as measures of musical ability. To assess mating success we examined number of sex-partners, age of first intercourse, sociosexuality, and number of offspring. General intelligence, simple reaction time, and height were used to investigate relationships with traits putatively related to genetic quality. Twin modelling showed moderate genetic influences on musical aptitude for both sexes (heritability estimates were 38% for males and 51% for females). Music achievement was also moderately influenced by genetic influences in males (heritability = 57%), but the genetic influences were low and nonsignificant for females (heritability = 9%). Contrary to predictions, the majority of phenotypic associations between musical ability and music achievement with mating success were nonsignificant or significant in the other direction, with those with greater musical ability scoring lower on the measures of mating success. Genetic correlations between these measures were also nonsignificant. Most correlations of musical aptitude and music achievement with genetic quality measures were significant, including correlations with general intelligence, simple reaction time, and, in females, height (but only for aptitude). However, only the correlation between musical aptitude and general intelligence in men was significantly driven by overlapping genetic influences. Our findings provide little support for a role of sexual selection in the evolution of musical ability. Alternative explanations and limitations are discussed.
Article
Matching the timing of one's movements to the movements of others has been proposed to increase affiliation and prosociality. Although coordinated movements facilitate early social interactions, not much is known about the mechanisms and effects of movement synchrony throughout development. Two studies investigated 12-month-olds' (Study 1, N = 40) and 9-month-olds' (Study 2, N = 41) preferences for synchronous others in a social as opposed to a nonsocial context. It was found that movement synchrony exclusively guides infants' social choices at 12 months. In contrast, 9-month-olds did not show any preferences for synchronous movements in social or nonsocial contexts. Results suggest that movement synchrony is important in guiding infants' social preferences and its effects emerge toward the end of the 1st year of life. © 2015 The Authors. Child Development © 2015 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.
Article
One year ago we published a review article in Music Perception surveying and summarizing the empirical literature relevant to the evolutionary origins of music. Seven pieces commenting on our review have appeared in the present issue. In this reply we discuss some of the arguments made by the commentators and clarify some of the points made in our original review.
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Male Golden‐collared Manakins Manacus vitellinus perform an elaborate courtship display composed of acrobatic jumps between saplings delimiting a court on the forest floor. Males rehearse their displays for hours until they are executed with amazing precision and speed. Here we investigated the plasticity of the display by examining whether males modify their choreography in response to a disturbance, such as when a small branch is placed against one of the saplings. Male Manakins performed displays that were longer and lacked a key element that invites females to copulate, supporting the hypothesis that males learn a specific sequence of moves to build their choreography.
Article
Several studies have demonstrated that auditory enrichment can reduce stereotypic behaviors in captive animals. The purpose of this study was to determine the relative effectiveness of three different types of auditory enrichment—naturalistic sounds, classical music, and rock music—in reducing stereotypic behavior displayed by Western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla). Three gorillas (one adult male, two adult females) were observed at the Buffalo Zoo for a total of 24 hr per music trial. A control observation period, during which no sounds were presented, was also included. Each music trial consisted of a total of three weeks with a 1-week control period in between each music type. The results reveal a decrease in stereotypic behaviors from the control period to naturalistic sounds. The naturalistic sounds also affected patterns of several other behaviors including locomotion. In contrast, stereotypy increased in the presence of classical and rock music. These results suggest that auditory enrichment, which is not commonly used in zoos in a systematic way, can be easily utilized by keepers to help decrease stereotypic behavior, but the nature of the stimulus, as well as the differential responses of individual animals, need to be considered. Zoo Biol. XX:XX–XX, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Article
Using music as a model, mother/infant vocalisations are examined using computer-based acoustic analysis. Past research is summarised which demonstrates the importance of both parties in the mother-infant dyad. Methods are then introduced for analysing pulse, quality and narrative in mother/infant vocalisations. These three elements comprise “communicative musicality”: those attributes of human communication, which are particularly exploited in music, that allow co-ordinated companionship to arise. The analysis of pulse is based on spectrographs analysis, and regular timing intervals are discovered that serve to co-ordinate the mother's and infant's joint vocalisations. Quality consists of both the pitch-contour of the vocalisations, and their timbre. Pitch plots are derived using software developed for this project using a constant Q spectral transform. I examine how the infant and mother structure their joint exploration of pitch space on the small and large scale. Timbre is measured with a variety of acoustic measures – tristimulus values, sharpness, roughness and width. It is found that the mother's voice changes its quality in response to the infant's. Narrative combines pulse and quality – it allows two persons to share a sense of passing time – and the musical companionship is examined that is created between a mother and her baby as she chants a nursery rhyme. It is concluded that communicative musicality is vital for companionable parent/infant communication.