Keywords: Music; Musicality; Comparative research.

Author Henkjan Honing on the article: 

Over the years it has become clear that we all share a predisposition for music, just like we have for language. Even those of us who can’t play a musical instrument or lack a sense of rhythm can perceive and enjoy music. The current paper refers to this unique predisposition – in all its complexity – as musicality, defined as a natural, spontaneously developing set of traits that are based on and constrained by our cognitive abilities and its underlying biology. As such, music – in all its diversity – can be defined as a social and cultural construct that is built on this musicality.

This distinction might appear trivial, but it demarcates an important shift in music research from studying the structure of music (across cultures and species) to studying the structure of musicality, i.e. the cognitive and biological capacities that can give rise to music. This important shift in research is also reflected in the book titles of the seminal The Origins of Music (Wallin et al., 2000) and the more recent The Origins of Musicality (Honing, 2018). The latter publication has laid the foundation for an ambitious and interdisciplinary research agenda of which the current paper functioned as a first step. (A research agenda for 2022-2025 can be found at https://www.mcg.uva.nl/research.html under research questions 1 and 2.)

Both scholars and scientists agree that music appears in most, if not all cultures, from the oldest civilizations of Africa, China, and the Middle East to the countless cultures of today’s world. No culture has yet been found that does not have music (Mehr et al., 2019). Still, some music researchers are skeptical about the biological foundations of musicality. In their view, every form of music in every culture is unique and is determined by human, social, and cultural conventions. However, over the past few years, more and more systematic research has been conducted on the similarities and differences between music from around the world, research that brings us closer to being able to separate the biological and cultural contributions to musicality.

In short, the paper introduces a research program on musicality (discussed in more detail in Honing, 2018; Honing et al., 2015) that combines functional, developmental, phylogenetic, and mechanistic approaches in order to generate an integrated theory of musicality. The main strategy is to focus on the constituent capacities underlying the musicality phenotype and find ways to effectively probe these traits in humans and animal models. Inspired by the four explanatory levels that Tinbergen posited (Tinbergen, 1963), describing the mechanisms, functions, phylogeny, and developmental course of musicality in a variety of animals and cultures, and with input from anthropological, neuroscientific and genetic sources, it will hopefully enhance understanding of both the cultural and biological factors that contribute to music and musicality and how they might have evolved.

References

Honing, H. (Ed.). (2018). The Origins of Musicality. The MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/origins-musicality

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

Mehr, S. A., Singh, M., Knox, D., Ketter, D. M., Pickens-Jones, D., Atwood, S., Lucas, C., Jacoby, N., Egner, A. A., Hopkins, E. J., Howard, R. M., Hartshorne, J. K., Jennings, M. V, Simson, J., Bainbridge, C. M., Pinker, S., O, T. J., Krasnow, M. M. & Glowacki, L. (2019). Universality and diversity in human song. Science, 366(November), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aax0868

Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of ethology. Zeitschrift Für Tierpsychologie, 410–433. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1439-0310.1963.tb01161.x/abstract

Wallin, N., Merker, B. & Brown, S. (Eds.). (2000). The Origins of Music. The MIT Press.

Honing, H. (2018). On the biological basis of musicality. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 1423, Issue 1, p. 51-56. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.13638