The Origins of Musicality by Henkjan Honing

Author:Henkjan Honing
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Music appreciation; Music cognition; Origins of musicality; Evolution of music; Ethnomusicology; Behavioral biology
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2018-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

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Finding the Beat: A Neural Perspective across Humans and Nonhuman Primates

Hugo Merchant, Jessica Grahn, Laurel J. Trainor, Martin Rohrmeier, and W. Tecumseh Fitch

Beat perception is a cognitive ability that allows the detection of a regular pulse (or beat) in music and permits synchronous responding to this pulse during dancing and musical ensemble playing (Honing, 2013; Large & Palmer, 2002). Most people can recognize and reproduce a large number of rhythms, and they can move in synchrony to the beat by rhythmically timed movements of different body parts (such as finger or foot taps or body sway). Beat perception and synchronization can be considered fundamental musical traits that arguably played a decisive role in the origins of music (Honing, 2013). A large proportion of human music is organized by a quasi-isochronous pulse and frequently also in a metrical hierarchy in which the beats of one level are typically spaced at two or three times those of a faster level (in the simplest Western cases, the tempo of one level is 1/2 [march meter] or 1/3 [waltz meter] that of the other), and human listeners can typically synchronize at more than one level of the metrical hierarchy (Drake, Jones, & Baruch, 2000; Large & Jones, 1999). Furthermore, movement on every second versus every third beat of an ambiguous rhythm pattern (one, for example, that can be interpreted as either a march or a waltz) biases listeners to interpret it as either a march or a waltz, respectively (Phillips-Silver & Trainor, 2007). Therefore, the concept of beat perception and synchronization implies both that the beat does not always need to be physically present in order to be “perceived” and the pulse evokes a particular perceptual pattern in the subject via active cognitive processes. Interestingly, humans do not need special training to perceive and motorically entrain to the beat in musical rhythms; rather, it appears to be a robust, ubiquitous and intuitive behavior. Indeed, even young infants perceive metrical structure (Winkler, Háden, Ladinig, Sziller, & Honing, 2009), and an infant who is bounced on every second beat or on every third beat of an ambiguous rhythm pattern is biased to interpret the meter of the auditory rhythm in a manner consistent with how he or she was moved to it. Thus, although rhythmic entrainment is a complex phenomenon that depends on a dynamic interaction between the auditory and motor systems in the brain (Merchant & Honing, 2014; Zatorre, Chen, & Penhune, 2007), it emerges very early in development without special training (Phillips-Silver & Trainor, 2005).

Recent studies support the notion that the timing mechanisms used in the brain depend on whether the time intervals in a sequence can be timed relative to a steady beat (relative, or beat-based, timing) or not (absolute, or duration-based) timing (Povel & Essens, 1985; Teki, Grube, Kumar, & Griffiths, 2011; Yee, Holleran, & Jones, 1994; (Schubotz, Friederici, Yves von Cramon, 2000). In relative timing, time intervals are measured relative to a regular perceived beat (Teki et al., 2011), to which individuals are able to entrain.

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