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| After a decade of exciting new findings, it seems that Darwin was at least partly right. Photo: MIT Press Reader |
We are all born with a predisposition for music,
one that develops spontaneously and is refined by listening to music.
Think, for example, 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 primed for music at birth with respect
to both the perception and enjoyment of listening.
As such, the
human capacity for music appears to be special. But what makes it
special, and is our musical predisposition unique, like our linguistic
ability? Or is musicality something with a long evolutionary history
that we share with other animals?Charles Darwin assumed that all animals can detect and appreciate melody and rhythm simply because they have a nervous system comparable to that of humans. He therefore had no doubt that human musicality had a biological foundation and a long evolutionary history, an idea that inspired a new field of scientific study — biomusicology — and set me on the path to writing my book, “The Evolving Animal Orchestra.”...
This theory led me to visit the Primate Research Institute in Inuyama, Japan, where the primatologist Yuko Hattori was investigating the musicality of chimpanzees. Her initial findings suggested that chimpanzees do indeed have beat perception, thus allowing us to date the origins of human beat perception to the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, some five to ten million years ago. Last month, the study was published in the Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences and confirmed the GAE hypothesis.
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Recommended Reading
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| The Evolving Animal Orchestra: In Search of What Makes Us Musical |
Source: The MIT Press Reader
