Preface to the Special Section on Animal Music Perception
Marisa Hoeschele
University of Vienna
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Author Note: Marisa Hoeschele, Department of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Marisa Hoeschele at marisa.hoeschele@univie.ac.at
Music is found around the world in all human cultures, no matter how isolated. Although its function is still debated (Fitch, 2005; Honing, Cate, Peretz, & Trehub, 2015; Justus & Hutsler, 2005; Masataka, 2009), music clearly plays an important role in human life. The fact that music is ubiquitous suggests that music is part of our biology.
The biological study of music has recently gained momentum. Only three years ago, Henkjan Honing put together a workshop at the Lorentz Center with people from many different disciplines around the world, all of whom were interested in the question, What makes us musical animals? (See Lorentz Center, 2014)
Twenty-three key researchers from psychology, biology, music, neuroscience, anthropology, and computer science came together to discuss the problem of how we can approach studying the biology of music. From there, we wrote a special issue for Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (see introduction; Honing et al., 2015).
My aim within this workshop and special issue was to present the goals and challenges when using a comparative approach to study the biology of music (see Hoeschele, Merchant, Kikuchi, Hattori, & ten Cate, 2015). Comparative biomusicology is still a relatively new area of study, with only a handful of studies having occurred prior to the 2000s. In comparative biomusicology, we try to understand the evolution of music by considering the factors of our musical faculty that are relevant to other species. Because human musical systems have, of course, grown immensely because of cultural evolution, we focus on musicality rather than music itself. Musicality refers to the traits, or core abilities and behaviors, that constitute our natural ability to produce and perceive music. Are aspects of human musicality found in other species? Are they widespread? Or do they depend on specific phylogenetic or biological niche factors?
Recently, a lot of attention has been placed on rhythm perception and production in animals. Especially since Aniruddh Patel’s (Patel, Iversen, Bregman, & Schulz, 2009) study on Snowball, the dancing cockatoo and his ability to track and move to the beat in music, there has been much focus on rhythmic entrainment across the animal kingdom. Fantastic recent neural research in primates has been produced (see Merchant & Bartolo, 2017, for review), and a recent special issue on the evolution of rhythm cognition had quite a few comparative contributions as well (Benichov, Globerson, & Tchernichovski, 2016; Dufour, Pasquaretta, Gayet, & Sterck, 2017; Gamba et al., 2016; Hartbauer & Römer, 2016; Hoeschele & Bowling, 2016; Norton & Scharff, 2016; Ravignani, Fitch, Hanke, & Heinrich, 2016; Rouse, Cook, Large, & Reichmuth, 2016; Spierings & Cate, 2016; Ten Cate, Spierings, Hubert, & Honing, 2016).
However, there has been relatively less excitement and focus on pitch perception across species in recent years. One of the goals of the Lorentz workshop was to outline human musical universals that are ripe for study from a biological perspective. For example, besides beat perception and metrical encoding of rhythm, Honing et al. (2015) pointed out that relative pitch and tonal encoding of pitch are potentially basic components of musicality. Other relevant candidates might be octave generalization (Crickmore, 2003) and consonance (Cook & Fujisawa, 2006). All of these pitch-related issues are the focus of the current issue and are explained and discussed in detail with reference to cross-species work in the following four articles.
This special issue is especially timely given a recent article in Nature (McDermott, Schultz, Undurraga, & Godoy, 2016) that pushed the interpretation that much of human appreciation for particular pitch relationships is based in cultural evolution rather than any innate predispositions. This has stirred up much debate among researchers because, as with any nature/nurture debate, there is evidence supporting both the role of nature and nurture in our acoustic preferences. This entanglement is further made complicated by increasing globalization and the difficulty finding people who are truly culturally isolated from one another. Studying other species can hopefully add another perspective to help untangle these issues.
Our goal with this issue is to bring attention to the study of pitch perception across species in order to both stimulate further comparative research and also force us to rethink what we know about humans. Much of the work we have done suggests that the music-theoretical view of human pitch perception may be at odds with how both humans and other animals perceive sound. We ask readers of this special issue to keep two questions in mind:
- Are humans unique in their approach to
pitch perception? - Can we use the results of experimental non-human animal work to enhance the study
of human pitch perception?
In conclusion, because pitch plays such an important role in human music (see Burns, 1999) and appears to be a relevant factor in the core universals of music (see Honing et al., 2015), we hope that our discussion of pitch can work parallel to the work being conducted on rhythm to shed light on the evolution of music.”
References
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Burns, E. M. (1999). Intervals, scales, and tuning. In D. Deutsch (Ed.), The Psychology of Music (Second, pp. 215–264). San Diego: Academic Press.
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Crickmore, L. (2003). A re-valuation of the ancient science of harmonics. Psychology of Music, 31(4). doi:10.1177/03057356030314004
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