No progress since Darwin and Spencer?

Darwin and Spencer.

Asif Ghazanfar and Gavin Steingo open their recent Commentary in Science, by asserting that –because no fossil or archaeological record of early music-making exists– modern musicality researchers “rely as much on conjecture as they did in Darwin and Spencer’s time.” 

This characterization is inaccurate. 

The evolution of musicality can be reconstructed using methods from comparative biology, genetics, and cross-cultural analyses, empirical domains that were unavailable to Darwin and Spencer. 

Over the past twenty years, musicality research has shown that virtually all humans have a natural capacity for music (1, 2), comparable to our innate capacity for language. Examples include beat processing in human newborns (3), species-specific precursors of both rhythmic and pitch processing (4, 5), and showing cross-cultural ‘universals’ in the structural aspects of human music (6–8), suggesting a biological basis. Additionally, recent neuroscientific findings indicate that humans process speech and music through distinct — and possibly independently evolved — neural pathways (9). Together, these findings constitute a robust empirical foundation rather than conjecture and have substantially reshaped our understanding of musicality. 

While trained tapping in macaques (10)—as discussed in Ghazanfar and Steingo’s Perspective—addresses only one subcomponent of musicality, it nonetheless offers a valuable window into its evolution, particularly within the framework of the Gradual Audiomotor Evolution (GAE) hypothesis (11). This hypothesis proposes that beat perception and synchronization emerged through incremental increases in the connection between cortical and subcortical motor planning regions. Probing beat perception and isochrony perception in animals is still in its infancy, but it appears, at least within the primate lineage, that beat perception has evolved gradually, peaking in humans and present only with some limitations in chimpanzees and other non-human primates (12, 13). 

Lastly, the relevant object of inquiry here is not music per se, but musicality. For this reason, Ghazanfar and Steingo’s analogy comparing the study of music evolution to ‘human bike evolution’ is unhelpful. Riding a bike requires explicit training even in humans, whereas moving to a musical beat emerges spontaneously and effortlessly, often before the onset of language. This spontaneity is precisely what places beat perception so prominently within musicality research. In other primates, beat perception is not effortless but can be acquired through training, suggesting that for them it is analogous to bike riding in humans. As the authors note, studying trained abilities can nevertheless reveal the basic processes underlying those abilities. More generally, both spontaneous and trained behaviors in animals offer complementary insights into their evolutionary capacities: humans spontaneously acquire speech but can be trained to imitate bird calls, indicating a specialized drive for conspecific communication alongside a broader capacity for vocal imitation. Similarly, non-human primates possess timing and pattern-detection abilities that may form the evolutionary substrate from which human beat induction emerged. Overall, comparative research across cultures and across species provides a powerful framework for uncovering the biological foundations and evolutionary history of musicality. 

As a result, investigating the origins of musicality has become increasingly feasible. What was once a largely speculative corner of musicology has developed into a rapidly advancing interdisciplinary field, rich with compelling new research questions.  

Published as eLetter in Science on December 9, 2025; Written by Henkjan Honing - University of Amsterdam, NL; W. Tecumseh Fitch - University of Vienna, AT; Marisa Hoeschele - Austrian Academy of Sciences, AT; Hugo Merchant - Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, MX  

 

References

1. H. Honing, C. ten Cate, I. Peretz, S. E. Trehub, Without it no music: cognition, biology and evolution of musicality. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 370, 20140088 (2015).
2. W. T. Fitch, Four principles of bio-musicology. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 370, 197–202 (2015).
3. I. Winkler, G. P. Háden, O. Ladinig, I. Sziller, H. Honing, Newborn infants detect the beat in music. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 106, 2468–71 (2009).
4. C. ten Cate, H. Honing, “Precursors of music and language in animals” in The Oxford Handbook of Language and Music, D. Sammler, Ed. (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2025; https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/59773).
5. M. Hoeschele, H. Merchant, Y. Kikuchi, Y. Hattori, C. ten Cate, Searching for the origins of musicality across species. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 370 (2015).
6. J. H. McDermott, A. F. Schultz, E. A. Undurraga, R. A. Godoy, Indifference to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception. Nature 25, 21–25 (2016).
7. P. E. Savage, S. Brown, E. Sakai, T. E. Currie, Statistical universals reveal the structures and functions of human music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, 8987–8992 (2015).
8. N. Jacoby, E. H. Margulis, M. Clayton, E. Hannon, H. Honing, J. Iversen, T. R. Klein, S. A. Mehr, L. Pearson, I. Peretz, M. Perlman, R. Polak, A. Ravignani, P. E. Savage, G. Steingo, C. J. Stevens, L. Trainor, S. Trehub, M. Veal, M. Wald-Fuhrmann, Cross-cultural work in music cognition: Challenges, insights and recommendations. Music Percept 37, 185–195 (2020).
9. P. Albouy, L. Benjamin, B. Morillon, R. J. Zatorre, Distinct sensitivity to spectrotemporal modulation supports brain asymmetry for speech and melody. Science (1979) 367, 1043–1047 (2020).
10. V. G. Rajendran, L. Prado, J. Pablo Marquez, H. Merchant, Monkeys have rhythm. Science (1979) 390, 940–944 (2025).
11. H. Merchant, H. Honing, Are non-human primates capable of rhythmic entrainment? Evidence for the gradual audiomotor evolution hypothesis. Front Neurosci 7, 1–8 (2014).
12. H. Honing, F. L. Bouwer, L. Prado, H. Merchant, Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) sense isochrony in rhythm, but not the beat. Front Neurosci 12 (2018).
13. Y. Hattori, M. Tomonaga, Rhythmic swaying induced by sound in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 117, 936–942 (2019).

 

Are humans unique?

In The Unique Animal, Rens Bod revisits an age-old philosophical question: what makes us human? His answer is that our uniqueness lies in unbounded recursion—which, according to Bod, is the defining feature that fundamentally distinguishes humans from all other animals. 

Recursion is undoubtedly an elegant notion, with a long and rich intellectual history, which gained renewed momentum in the second half of the twentieth century through, among others, Douglas Hofstadter’s influential book Gödel, Escher, Bach, Mandelbrot’s theory of fractals, and Chomsky’s claim that recursion is the only truly distinctive property of the human language faculty. 

Yet I wish to argue that this very search for uniqueness—for a single capacity that defines us—is a misleading enterprise. However intriguing recursion may be, it does not provide the solid foundation that some believe it does.  

1. The problem of uniqueness 

All animal species are unique. In that sense, we humans are unique as well—but not more so than other animals. Uniqueness is not rare; it is ubiquitous. The attempt to single out one exclusive feature in humans is therefore a peculiar, perhaps even pretentious, endeavor. The history of thought is full of such attempts—from Aristotle’s rational animal to Chomsky’s syntactic animal. But these efforts often reveal more about our desire to draw boundaries than about reality itself. We like to draw a sharp line between “human” and “animal,” while nature rarely complies.  

2. Recursion and its limits 

Recursion is without doubt a fascinating phenomenon, both mathematically and cognitively: the capacity to have thoughts about thoughts and to embed sentences within sentences. In theory, this allows infinite complexity to emerge from finite means—an influential idea.

But empirical reality is far less unbounded. Humans can process only a few levels of embedding—three, at most four—before losing track. In language, we lose the thread after the third subordinate clause; the same applies to reasoning and play. We can still follow that someone is pretending to pretend, but add yet another layer and we are lost. Unbounded recursion therefore does not describe how the human brain actually functions. Rather, it is a theoretical idealization—a concept that helps describe grammars and other hierarchical patterns in behavior, without necessarily contributing to deeper understanding. (The trees of linguistics have more than once prevented us from seeing the forest of our cognitive capacities.)

3. The problem of testability  

This leads to a more fundamental objection: unbounded recursion is not empirically testable. No experiment can demonstrate its existence, let alone falsify it, because every human performance is by definition finite. Nor can it be refuted, since any limitation can always be explained away as a matter of attention or memory. Thus the concept slips from the hands of science and drifts into the realm of metaphysics—into belief in something that may be true, but cannot be proven. For that reason, we must reject the thesis on rational grounds: not out of reluctance, but because a scientific explanation must be testable—or rather, falsifiable. 

4. Beyond the linguistic lens 

There is, moreover, another important factor at play: a widespread and persistent language bias in our thinking—a tendency I have pointed out before and written about elsewhere. Many researchers prefer to view cognitive phenomena through a linguistic lens. Because formal language systems are characterized by recursive structures, it is then often assumed that thought—and thus the human mind—must be recursive in nature. But cognition is more than language. 

Music offers an interesting counterexample. Music also exhibits hierarchical structures—structures characterized by multiple levels of organization, repetition, variation, and symmetry. These properties are not uniquely human: songbirds and various marine mammals structure their vocalizations in ways that show striking similarities to human music and can be regarded as precursors of our musical capacity. Hierarchy, however, is not synonymous with recursion. Although the two concepts are closely related, there is an essential difference: recursion presupposes a hierarchical structure, but a hierarchy need not be recursive.  

5. A different idea of uniqueness 

Perhaps we should therefore abandon the search for a single, exclusive feature and understand uniqueness differently—not as something belonging solely to humans, but as an emergent phenomenon arising from the convergence of multiple capacities. What makes humans special, then, is not one isolated property such as recursion, but a specific combination of components that together form a unique whole. From this perspective, the question shifts from “What do humans have that other animals do not?” to “Which capacities make a species unique?” Our uniqueness is not a single essence, but an evolutionary pattern—a fabric of gradually developed capacities that together form the basis for culture, language, and music.  

Epilogue — in relation to The Arrogant Ape  

In The arrogant ape, Christine Webb dismantles the deeply rooted human tendency to overestimate our own exceptionalism. Humans, she argues, are not the pinnacle of evolution but one species among many—remarkable, yes, but not categorically superior. What Webb calls “arrogance” is precisely the urge critiqued in the column above: the desire to locate one decisive trait that elevates us above all other animals. In short, abandoning the myth of the uniquely gifted human does not diminish us. On the contrary: it situates us more accurately within the living world, as one expressive, musical, meaning-making species among many—remarkable not despite that continuity, but because of it. 

Bod, R. (2025). Het unieke dier: Op zoek naar het specifiek menselijke. Amsterdam: Prometheus.
Webb, C. (2025). De arrogante aap: Waarom we niet zo uniek zijn als we denken. Amsterdam: Atlas Contact.

 See also https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/e38e36c0-4c95-4f7c-a3fa-5c890f5b5b7f.

Musical Animals: Are we? Can there be?

On November 20, 2025, the Royal Palace Amsterdam hosted the symposium “Music and Mind, Music as Medicine,” part of the ongoing series organized by the Amsterdam Royal Palace Foundation. The event brought together leading voices reflecting on how music shapes thought, health, and human experience.

I had the honour to present the opening keynote, “Musical Animals: Are We? Can There Be?”, about musicality as a natural, biological capacity. I explored the question of whether humans are truly unique in perceiving rhythm and melody—or whether other species share aspects of what we call “music.”

You can listen to the keynote here: Download audio file [or go to Royal Palace website].

Prof. Em. Daniel J. Levitin followed with insights from neuroscience and psychology, connecting music to memory, emotion, and healing. His perspective added valuable depth to the symposium’s theme of music as medicine.

The day was further enriched by a powerful performance from Dame Evelyn Glennie, whose artistry and reflections on listening brought the scientific discussions into vivid, lived experience.

Special thanks were due to Tania Kross and Prof. Ineke Sluiter, who co-chaired the symposium and guided the conversations with clarity and warmth.

Altogether, the event offered a meaningful window into how music—whether studied in labs, performed onstage, or felt in our bodies—continues to inspire new questions and connections.

All recordings can be found at the wesbite of the Royal Palace.

A draft article, with the same title, can be found here as preprint. 

Gaat muzikaliteit aan muziek én taal vooraf? [Dutch]

Foto: Iris Vette

Hoe het brein van onze verre voorouders eruitzag, is niet meer na te gaan. Toch is er via een omweg misschien iets te zeggen over het ontstaan van taal, en de rol die muziek daarbij speelde.

Veel taalkundigen geloven —vreemd genoeg— dat onze liefde voor muziek meelift op ons taalvermogen (zie bijvoorbeeld NRC uit 2016 en Steven Pinker's invloedrijke boek How the mind works). Maar zou het niet, en even waarschijnlijk, precies andersom kunnen zijn?

Voor een overzicht van de recente ontwikkelingen op het gebied van de neurowetenschappen van taal en muziek, zie bijv. Peretz et al. (2015), Norman-Haignere et al. (2015) en de video hieronder: een registratie van de lezing Voor de muziek uit die ik in 2016 gaf op het tweejaarlijkse congres Onze Taal in het Chassé Theater in Breda.

N.B. Een samenvatting van de tekst verscheen in het tijdschrift Onze Taal. De integrale tekst verscheen in het interdisciplinaire tijdschrift Blind.



Norman-Haignere, S., Kanwisher, N., & McDermott, J. (2015). Distinct Cortical Pathways for Music and Speech Revealed by Hypothesis-Free Voxel Decomposition Neuron, 88 (6), 1281-1296 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.11.035

Peretz, I., Vuvan, D., Lagrois, M., & Armony, J. (2015). Neural overlap in processing music and speech Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370 (1664), 20140090-20140090 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0090

Can birds imitate Artoo-Detoo?

The research summarized in an infographic (Dam et al., 2025).

When you think of birds imitating sounds, parrots and starlings might come to mind. They’re famous for copying human speech, car alarms, and even ringtone melodies. But what happens when you challenge them with something really complex, like the electronic beeps and boops of R2-D2, the beloved Star Wars droid? Researchers from the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University put nine species of parrots and European starlings to the test.

Starlings versus parrots

It turns out that starlings had the upper hand when it came to mimicking the more complex 'multiphonic sounds. Thanks to the unique morphology of their vocal organ, the syrinx, which has two sound sources. This allows starlings to reproduce multiple tones at once—perfect for R2-D2-style chatter.

Parrots, on the other hand, are limited to producing one tone at a time (just like humans). Still, they held their own when it came to the simpler “monophonic” beeps of R2-D2. Interestingly, it weren’t the famously chatty African grey parrots or amazon parrots that did best, but the smaller species, like budgerigars and cockatiels. These little birds, often thought of as less impressive vocalists, actually outperformed the larger species in this specific task, likely by using different strategies to imitate sounds.

Even sounds from science fiction can teach us something real

The researchers call their study a fun but powerful window into how anatomy, like the structure of a bird’s vocal organ, can shape the limits and possibilities of their vocal skills. It is the first time that so many different species all produced the same complex sounds, which finally allows for a direct comparison. This shows that even sounds from science fiction can teach us something real about the evolution of communication and learning in animals.

And here’s the cool part: much of the sound data came from pet owners and bird lovers participating in citizen science through the Bird Singalong Project. With their help, the researchers were able to gather a richer, more diverse collection of bird sounds than ever before, proving that science doesn't always have to happen in a lab.

Reference

Dam, N.C.P., Honing, H. & M.J. Spierings (2025). What imitating an iconic robot reveals on allospecific vocal imitation in parrots and starlings. Scientific Reports, 15, 36816. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-23444-7

Piano touch unraveled. Touché?

[From Kuromiya et al., 2025: Figure 1B]

 

[Adapted from interview by Elleke Bal, Trouw, 3 October 2025]

Two professional pianists may perform on the exact same piano, in the same concert hall, and even play the same notes at the same tempo. Yet, through the way they touch the keys, they are able to produce strikingly different sounds from the instrument.

This so-called timbre—the tonal color or quality of sound—has long been a subject of fascination and debate among musicians and listeners alike. Consider, for example, the crystalline clarity of Glenn Gould versus the warmth of Sviatoslav Richter. But what exactly constitutes clarity or warmth? For pianists, these are intuitive concepts. For scientists, however, the challenge has been to find objective evidence that such distinctions arise from unique motor actions at the keyboard.

The researchers examined which motor skills underpinned these differences. They found that timbral variation was strongly associated with a limited set of keystroke parameters: the velocity of key descent, the temporal spacing between successive key presses, and the synchrony between hands. Crucially, one factor emerged as particularly decisive: the acceleration of the key movement at the precise moment the hammer disengages. According to the authors, this acceleration largely determines the resulting timbre (Kuromiya et al., 2025).

(c) 2025 Trouw

This study demonstrates the extraordinary precision achieved by highly trained pianists. Nuances in timing and velocity of a few milliseconds can shape timbre in ways that are musically significant. These micro-timing differences are the product of extensive practice and experimentation at the instrument. However, the study overlooked one key factor: the velocity of the hammer striking the string. Without measuring hammer dynamics, the account of timbre remains incomplete. Companies such as Yamaha have long recognized this; their Disklavier Pro system, for example, replicates hammer velocity to convincingly reproduce the playing of pianists like Glenn Gould.

Ultimately, it is the hammer which, at the moment it is released from the piano’s action mechanism, independently carries the cumulative timing and dynamic input of the performer. Its subsequent trajectory toward the string—and the resulting timbre—is determined by its momentum, defined by the combined effects of its velocity and mass.

Does reducing the artistry of great pianists to numerical parameters diminish the magic of a performance? I don’t think so: This research only reinforces the extraordinary dexterity, control, and timing that distinguish master pianists.

References 
Kuromiya, K., et al. (2025). Motor origins of timbre in piano performance, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.,122 (39) e2425073122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2425073122 
Goebl, W., & Palmer, C. (2008). Tactile feedback and timing accuracy in piano performance. Experimental Brain Research, 186 (3), 471-479 DOI: 10.1007/s00221-007-1252-1 

 

Was het vroeger allemaal anders? [Dutch]

[N.B. Column uit 2005]  

De faculteit verplicht vanaf heden iedere medewerker alleen nog maar te schrijven met een balpen van het merk Bic. De argumenten zijn: ze schrijven net zo goed als andere pennen, zijn een stuk goedkoper, behoeven zo goed als geen onderhoud, en mocht er dit toch nodig zijn dan heeft de faculteit een geolied team van Bic-experts in dienst. Vulpennen en potloden mogen niet meer gebruikt worden. Alleen na uitzonderlijke toestemming mag een medewerker zijn vulpen gebruiken maar onder de voorwaarde alleen op eigen papier te schrijven (‘inktvlekken zijn voor eigen risico; Bic’s vlekken niet’ zo zegt de ondersteunende afdeling).  

Leest dit als een knullig fantasieverhaaltje? Vervang de Bicpen door een Windows-computer en de vulpen door bijvoorbeeld een Apple-computer en het voorbeeld beschrijft het huidige ICT-beleid van de faculteit.  Wat is hier nu zo irritant aan? Dit soort beleid stamt uit een tijd dat een computer iets onbeheersbaars was, iets waar alleen bèta’s in stofjassen aan mochten komen. We zijn inmiddels zo’n dertig jaar verder en de computer heeft een belangrijke en soms haast persoonlijke plaats in onze dagelijkse denk- en werkruimte ingenomen. Een privédomein waaraan je specifieke en persoonlijke eisen stelt. Een werkgever die de inrichting en de mogelijke bewegingen in deze denk- en werkruimte bepaalt is niet meer van deze tijd. 

Een voorbeeld. In mijn muziekonderzoek speelt de computer een grote rol. Naast een belangrijke rol in theorievorming wordt de computer regelmatig ingezet voor online internetexperimenten. Het formaat dat voor de geluidsvoorbeelden gebruikt wordt is MPEG4 (een internationale standaard die hoge geluidskwaliteit garandeert via zowel modem als DSL). Deze standaard wordt echter om strategische redenen (Microsoft wil zijn eigen standaards promoten) niet ondersteund op Windows-computers. De experimenten kunnen dus niet door de studenten en medewerkers op UvA-computers uitgevoerd worden. Met als concreet gevolg dat weinig studenten en medewerkers musicologie meedoen aan het onderzoek. 

Dit soort restricties als gevolg van beleidskeuzes heeft zo z’n gevolgen. De trend die je ziet ontstaan is dat studenten en medewerkers UvA-DSL nemen en thuis in alle vrijheid hun laptop inrichten zoals zij dat willen. En aangezien een laptop niet aangesloten mag worden op het interne UvA-netwerk wordt zo het thuiswerken extra gestimuleerd (en onderhoud en beheer een privézaak). 

Het beleid heeft echter ook grotere gevolgen dan irritaties bij studenten en medewerkers. Wederom een voorbeeld. Bij de onderhandelingen over een recentelijk toegekend onderzoeksproject van de EU met een grote technologische component, is om o.a. infrastructurele redenen besloten het project niet bij de faculteit geesteswetenschappen (FGw) maar bij de bèta wetenshcappen (FNWI) te plaatsen. Dat is erg jammer en het kan het onderzoek en onderwijs bij de FGw alleen maar verarmen. 

Mijn (ongevraagd) advies is dan ook: leg overal in de faculteit WiFi aan, geef iedere studenten een high-tech laptop (met flinke korting), en laat iedereen vrijelijk experimenteren en downloaden. Mijn voorspelling: binnen twee jaar zijn er geen vaste computers én geen ondersteuning meer nodig, net zo min als er ooit een afdeling vulpennen-beheer nodig was. 

Henkjan Honing (Amsterdam, April 2005)

Hoezo geen ritmegevoel? [Dutch]

 

Een video short van de Universiteit van Nederland.

Are there controversies in pitch and timbre perception research? [in 333 words]

European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris)

At the heart of human musicality lie fundamental questions about how we perceive sound. In the coming academic year our group will dedicate several meetings on exploring and clarifying the spectral percepts that might underlie musicality with an agenda set around some enduring controversies. These span the roles of learning, culture, and cross-species comparisons, as well as evolutionary explanations for why music holds such sway over human minds. 

Among the most debated topics is the relationship between pitch and timbre perception. Both pitch and timbre are percepts: mental constructs arising from acoustic input. In humans, pitch perception is central to melodic recognition. When we hear a melody, we tend to identify it by its sequence of relative pitches—hearing it as the “same” tune regardless of changes in timbre, loudness, or duration. This reliance on relative pitch is a cornerstone of human music cognition. 

But is pitch such a universal perceptual anchor? For years, researchers assumed so, pointing to songbirds as an obvious parallel. Birds, it was thought, must also use pitch cues, though often in the form of absolute rather than relative pitch. Yet recent evidence complicates this narrative. In a striking study, Bregman et al. (2016) reported that European starlings do not, in fact, rely on pitch when recognizing sequences of complex harmonic tones. Instead, they appear to attend more closely to spectral shape, or the broader distribution of energy across frequencies. 

This finding raises a further question: is it really the spectral envelope (i.e. spectral shape) that matters, or something more subtle? Because the methods used—particularly contour-preserving noise vocoding—leave open another possibility: birds may actually be attuned to fine spectral-temporal modulations, the intricate contours woven into sound. Such results remind us that perceptual categories humans take for granted may not map cleanly onto other species, and that the universality of pitch as a cognitive anchor remains an open, and fascinating, controversy (cf. Patel, 2017; ten Cate & Honing, 2025). 

N.B. These entries are part of a new series of explorations on the notion of Spectral Percepts (in 333 words each). 

Bregman, M. R., Patel, A. D. & Gentner, T. Q. (2016). Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(6), 1666–1671. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1515380113 

Patel, A. D. (2017). Why Doesn’t a Songbird (the European Starling) Use Pitch to Recognize Tone Sequences? The Informational Independence Hypothesis. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, 12, 19–32. doi: 10.3819/CCBR.2017.120003 

ten Cate, C. & Honing, H. (2025). Precursors of music and language in animals. In D. Sammler (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Music. Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192894700.001.0001

Is consonance a biological or a cultural phenomenon? [in 333 words]

Chick in consonance experiment (Chiandetti & Vallortigara, 2011).

The distinction between consonance and dissonance has long occupied a central place in the scientific study of auditory perception and music cognition. Consonant intervals are typically described as stable, harmonious, or pleasing, whereas dissonant intervals are often characterized as tense, unstable, or even harsh. Yet even these seemingly straightforward descriptions quickly lead to methodological debate. 

A central difficulty arises from the frequent conflation of “dissonance” with “roughness.” Roughness refers to a physiological effect caused by closely spaced frequencies interacting on the basilar membrane of the inner ear. This phenomenon is measurable, consistent, and largely universal across listeners. Consonance, however, is not reducible to physiology alone. Recent research emphasizes that consonance is a multidimensional construct, shaped by both acoustic properties such as harmonicity and by layers of cognitive and cultural familiarity (Lahdelma & Eerola, 2020). 

This controversy can be framed around two major questions (Harrison, 2021). First, do humans possess an innate preference for consonance over dissonance? Second, if such a preference exists, how might it be explained in evolutionary terms? A landmark study by McDermott et al. (2016) with the Tsimane’, an Amazonian group minimally exposed to Western music, found no consistent preference for consonant over dissonant intervals. Their conclusion was that what many listeners call “pleasant” is primarily shaped by cultural experience. 

This interpretation has been vigorously challenged. Bowling et al. (2017) cite empirical evidence from human infants (Trainor et al., 2002) and even non-human animals (Chiandetti & Vallortigara, 2011) that points toward at least some innate, hardwired auditory sensitivity. If so, consonance may reflect evolutionary selective pressures, possibly related to the spectral composition of human vocalizations and the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying pitch perception and auditory scene analysis. 

In the end, consonance appears to be neither purely biological nor purely cultural. Our ears detect roughness and harmonicity, but our minds interpret these sensations through cultural frameworks. What sounds stable in one tradition may sound unfamiliar in another. The consonance controversy thus highlights music cognition as an intricate interplay between biology and culture. 

N.B. These entries are part of a new series of explorations on the notion of Spectral Percepts (in 333 words each).

References

Bowling, D. L., Hoeschele, M., Gill, K. Z. & Fitch, W. T. (2017). The nature and nurture of musical consonance. Music Perception, 118–121. 

Chiandetti, C. & Vallortigara, G. (2011). Chicks like consonant music. Psychological Science, 22(10), 1270– 1273. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611418244 

 

Harrison, P. M. C. (2021). Three Questions concerning Consonance Perception. Music Perception, 337–339. https://doi.org/10.1525/MP.2021.38.3.337 

 

Lahdelma, I. & Eerola, T. (2020). Cultural familiarity and musical expertise impact the pleasantness of consonance/dissonance but not its perceived tension. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 8693. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-65615-8 

 

McDermott, J. H., Schultz, A. F., Undurraga, E. A. & Godoy, R. A. (2016). Indifference to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception. Nature, 25, 21–25. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature18635 

 

Trainor, L. J. & Unrau, A. (2012). Development of Pitch and Music Perception. In Human Auditory Development (pp. 223–254). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1421-6_8