Music Matters | A blog on music cognition

Is kunst goedkoper dan medicijnen? [Dutch]

2026-06-11T10:08:15.000+02:00

Soms blijft een woord of een hele zin hangen. Deze week stond in het Financieele Dagblad een opiniestuk van Jet Bussemaker met de wervende titel: Kunst verdient prominentere plek in zorgbeleid. Sympathiek, en er zijn zeker goede argumenten voor aan te voeren (vgl. het Paleissymposium in november 2025, dat over het belang van muziek ging).

Toch viel mij vooral de streamer op —"Patiënten die tijdens een operatie naar muziek luisteren, ervaren minder pijn en angst, blijkt uit onderzoek"— en vooral het woordje 'tijdens'... dat was inmiddels toch uitgezocht?

FD van 10 juni 2026

Ik moest meteen denken aan het Mozart-effect. Een jaar of vijfentwintig geleden werd muziekonderwijs graag verdedigd met het argument dat muziek je slimmer zou maken. Een aantrekkelijk idee, natuurlijk. Wie wil er geen slimmere kinderen? Maar precies daar ging het mis. Zoals psycholoog E. Glenn Schellenberg ooit fraai opmerkte: de lobby van het muziekonderwijs schoot zichzelf in de voet. Ze maakten intelligentie belangrijker dan muziek zelf. Dat was nergens voor nodig. Muziek heeft een intrinsieke waarde:

„Die cheerleaders van muziekonderwijs hebben zich in de voet geschoten door erop te hameren dat muziek je slimmer maakt, dat het goed is voor alles. Nu dat niet zo blijkt te zijn, is hun belangrijkste argument van tafel. Ze hadden moeten zeggen: muziek maakt dat we kunnen dromen, dansen, bewegen. Muziek is belangrijk op zichzelf.” – NRC, 25 augustus 2017.

Met kunst in de zorg dreigt iets vergelijkbaars. Natuurlijk kan kunst bijdragen aan welzijn. Natuurlijk kan muziek, dans, theater of beeldende kunst iets doen met stemming, aandacht, pijnbeleving of sociaal contact. Daar bestaat overtuigend onderzoek naar. Maar het woord “bewijs” vraagt hier om voorzichtigheid. En de claim genoemd in de streamer van het Opinie-stuk is eenvoudig te weerleggen (zie bijv. m'n eerdere blog, en stukken in Volkskrant en Trouw).

Wetenschap levert zelden bewijs in de wiskundige zin. Ze levert voortschrijdend inzicht, betere metingen, scherpere vragen, soms stevige aanwijzingen. En soms ook resultaten die later genuanceerd, afgezwakt of weersproken kunnen worden. Dat is geen zwakte van wetenschap. Dat ís wetenschap.

NRC, 20 mei 2014.

Daarom word ik wat onrustig van stellige claims als: 'het bewijs is gevonden'. Zeker wanneer afzonderlijke bevindingen vervolgens worden opgetild tot beleidsslogan. Dan wordt kunst een goedkoop medicijn, een cultureel paracetamol met subsidiepotentieel.

Dat lijkt me te klein gedacht. Kunst verdient een plek in de zorg omdat mensen meer nodig hebben dan behandeling alleen. Omdat ziekte niet alleen een biologisch probleem is. ‘Helend’ is wat dat betreft een beter woord dan ‘genezend’.

Is kunst dan goedkoper dan medicijnen? Misschien soms. Maar dat is vermoedelijk niet haar beste argument. Kunst is geen korting op zorg. Ze is eerder een raam in een kamer waar je te lang naar dezelfde muur hebt gekeken.

Celebrate Blogging?

2026-06-01T10:55:33.000+02:00

Apie, MCG's AI Assistent.

Back in July 2006, I was wondering whether the world really needed yet another blog. It was a fair question then, and I have asked myself the same thing at pleasingly regular intervals ever since. And yet, inconveniently, I seem to be enjoying it more than ever: writing small notes about research papers I come across, and tricking myself into reading them rather more carefully than I otherwise might.

Many of these posts began as modest exercises in thinking aloud, though some later escaped into articles, lectures, or teaching. Others became answers to questions that kept returning, often from high-school and university students, or from journalists with a curiosity about the Mozart effect, musical taste, catchy songs, our sense for rhythm, musical animals, and the possible origins of music (N.B It now serves as the database for Apie, MCG's Mascotte and AI Assistent, that tries to answer the questions that come in regularly).

Nature Editorial (2 June 2026)

Of course, blogging has been declared obsolete so often that it now seems to enjoy a surprisingly active afterlife [1,2,3]. First came social media, then podcasts, newsletters, Substack, Instagram reels, TikTok, and whatever is currently replacing whatever replaced the thing before that. So yes, this may now be a mildly archaeological and boomerisch corner of the internet.

Nevertheless, next month this blog celebrates its twentiest birthday. And this emeritus will simply hack on, if you don't mind :-).

Related blogs

[1] Is blogging outdated? [June 2011]

[2] Wetenschap in de blogosfeer? [March 2012]

[3] Is blogging not completely outdated? [July 2012]

References
Scientists in the future will not read articles like this (2026). Nature, 654, 8. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-01723-1

Batts, Shelley A., Anthis, Nicholas J., & Smith, Tara C. (2008). Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy. PLoS Biology, 6 (9), 240-245 doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060240

Saunders, M. E., Duffy, M., Heard, S., Kosmala, M., Leather, S., McGlynn, T., Ollerton, J., & Parachnowitsch, A. L. (2017). Bringing ecology blogging into the scientific fold: measuring reach and impact of science community blogs. Royal Society Open Science. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.170957

Rahate, V. V. (2023) Unveiling the Blogosphere: Exploring the Evolution, Impact, and Future of Blogging. International Journal of Advanced Research in Science, Communication and Technology, 129–136. https://doi.org/10.48175/ijarsct-12021

Was muziek vroeger complexer? [Dutch]

2026-05-24T07:20:36.000+02:00

Foto’s Getty Images, uit het besproken NRC artikel.

Hoe je muziek representeert op een manier die werkelijk iets zegt over haar structuur en ervaring, is al decennialang een centraal probleem binnen de muziektheorie, cognitieve musicologie en computationele muziekwetenschap. Wie ooit een ISMIR- of ICMPC-conferentie heeft bezocht, weet hoe principieel die vraag is: elke representatie (denk bijvoorbeeld aan de westerse muzieknotatie) maakt sommige eigenschappen zichtbaar en duwt andere naar de achtergrond. Wat een model kan vinden, hangt rechtstreeks samen met wat je vooraf besluit als muziek te coderen.

MIDI is daarvan misschien wel het bekendste voorbeeld. Het is in de jaren tachtig ontwikkeld als praktisch communicatieprotocol voor elektronische toetsinstrumenten — synthesizers, keyboards, digitale piano’s: welke toets wordt wanneer ingedrukt, hoe hard, en hoe lang. Een pianouitvoering is er goed mee te vast te leggen en te repliceren, maar het is natuurlijk alles behalve een realistische afspiegeling van hoe muziek gehoord, onthouden, gemaakt of gewaardeerd wordt.

NRC Opinie & Debat, 22 mei 2026

Tegen die achtergrond leest het artikel in Scientific Reports, dat deze week in de wetenschapsbijlage van het NRC werd besproken, als een technologisch indrukwekkende, maar theoretisch opvallend naïeve exercitie. De auteurs analyseerden zo’n twintigduizend MIDI-bestanden met behulp van netwerkanalyse, waarbij noten worden voorgesteld als knopen en overgangen tussen noten als verbindingen. Het resultaat oogt mathematisch elegant. Alleen: de muzikale werkelijkheid waarop die elegantie zou moeten slaan, is onderweg grotendeels verdwenen.

Want wat hier “muzikale complexiteit” heet, blijkt in feite vooral variatie in toonhoogteovergangen te meten (welke toets werd na een voorgaande toets ingedrukt). Ritme, metrum, dynamiek, articulatie, timbre, meerstemmingheid, vormopbouw — de dimensies waarin veel muziek haar spanning, identiteit en emotionele werking ontleent — spelen nauwelijks of geen rol. Een Bach-fuga, een compositie voor Javaanse gamelan of een solo van John Coltrane zijn hopeloos verloren.

Dat is geen onschuldige vereenvoudiging. Het bepaalt direct welke conclusies je überhaupt kunt trekken. Wie muziek reduceert tot toonhoogtenetwerken, zal uiteindelijk vooral patronen in toonhoogtenetwerken ontdekken. Dat klinkt triviaal, maar precies die cirkelredenering sluipt hier voortdurend binnen.

Ook het gebruik van MIDI-data zelf wringt. Partituurachtige invoer en expressieve uitvoeringen worden vrijwel identiek behandeld, waardoor rubato, microtiming en uitvoeringsnuance effectief worden weggefilterd. Polyfonie wordt bovendien teruggebracht tot opeenvolgingen van nootclusters, zonder serieuze modellering van stemvoering, contrapunt of harmonische functie. Muziek wordt daarmee behandeld alsof zij primair een lineair pad door toonhoogteruimte is. Een opmerkelijke aanname voor een studie die pretendeert iets algemeens te zeggen over muzikale evolutie.

De omgang met transpositie maakt het probleem nog scherper. De kernnetwerken zijn gebaseerd op absolute toonhoogtes, terwijl slechts een deel van de embeddings intervalrelaties transpositie-invariant behandelt. Daarmee raakt het model verstrikt in een van de oudste inzichten uit de muziekcognitie: mensen luisteren doorgaans relatief, niet absoluut. Een melodie blijft herkenbaar wanneer zij een toon hoger wordt gespeeld. Het model lijkt dat inzicht maar half te begrijpen.

Toch trekken de auteurs vervolgens de forse conclusie dat muziek door de tijd heen “eenvoudiger” zou zijn geworden. Dat is een nogal spectaculaire claim voor een analyse die blind blijft voor productie, timbre, ritmische gelaagdheid, studiotechniek en performatieve subtiliteit — kortom: voor vrijwel alles waarin veel hedendaagse muziek juist haar complexiteit organiseert. Misschien is complexiteit helemaal niet verdwenen, maar verplaatst. Van melodische variatie naar klankkleur. Van harmonische modulatie naar microtiming. Van noot naar sound.

En daar wringt uiteindelijk het diepste probleem. Muziek bestaat niet uit symbolen. Een MIDI-bestand is geen muziek, hooguit een recept, een uitvoeringsprotocol (in het geval van een pianouitvoering). Wie de geschiedenis van muziek probeert te begrijpen via zulke abstracties, loopt het risico hetzelfde te doen als iemand die de evolutie van spreektaal (of dialecten) reconstrueert op basis van spreadsheets met letterfrequenties. Je vindt ongetwijfeld patronen. Maar de stem zelf — timing, intonatie, aarzeling, nadruk, ademhaling — is dan al verdwenen voordat de analyse begint.

Referenties
Di Marco, N., Loru, E., Galeazzi, A. et al. (2026). Decoding the evolution of melodic and harmonic structure of Western music through the lens of network science. Sci Rep 16, 11121. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-42872-7

Do bumble bees sense rhythmic patterns?

2026-05-17T10:42:54.000+02:00

Zeng et al. (2026, Science) reported an intriguing study of rhythmic pattern discrimination in bumble bees (Bombus terrestris). However, the claim that “[bumble bees] form robust abstract rhythm representations” may be somewhat premature.

Overall, the study is fascinating: bees learned to discriminate flashing temporal patterns and appeared to generalize across tempi and sensory modalities. But a key question is whether this shows rhythm abstraction, or whether simpler temporal cues could explain the results.

A defining feature of rhythm cognition is tempo invariance: recognizing a temporal pattern when all its intervals are proportionally stretched or compressed. In Zeng et al.’s tempo-generalization experiment, however, flash durations varied while the silent gaps reportedly remained fixed at 100 ms. This means the test stimuli were not true proportional transformations of the training stimuli. Instead, they combined changing flash durations with fixed inter-flash gaps. That weakens the interpretation that bees recognized an abstract rhythmic relation.

There is also a simpler possible strategy. Bees may not have encoded the full pattern, but instead relied on local cues such as immediate element repetition or matching familiar temporal fragments such as a particular flash-plus-gap combination. Such strategies would still be cognitively interesting, but they are not the same as forming a global abstract rhythm representation.

The authors also suggest their findings challenge the hypothesis that vocal learning and flexible rhythm perception are linked. But that hypothesis concerns advantages for auditory rhythm processing in vocal-learning species; visual and vibrational discrimination in bees does not directly test it.

Bumble bees may indeed have impressive temporal abilities. But to demonstrate rhythm abstraction, future experiments should use proportionally scaled rhythms, including gaps, and rule out local-cue strategies. For now, rhythm abstraction in bumble bees remains an exciting possibility — but not yet a settled conclusion.

(For more see news article from Science, Zeng et al. study, and Comment.)

References

Zeng, Z., Barron, A. B., Peng, F., & Solvi, C. (2026). Flexible, abstract rhythm perception in bumble bees. Science, 392(6793), 93–95. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adz2894

Ning, Z.-Y., ten Cate, C., Patel, A. D., & Honing, H. (2026). Rhythm Abstraction in Bumble Bees Remains Inconclusive. PsyArXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/m7rph_v2

Isn't musicality more than rhythm?

2026-05-02T10:03:00.008+02:00

Last month, we organized a follow-up to the 2014 Lorentz Workshop on Musicality in Leiden, The Netherlands. Twelve years later, it felt both exciting and meaningful to return to Leiden with a renewed focus: spectral percepts.

While rhythm cognition has received substantial attention over the past decade, key perceptual dimensions of melodic cognition—especially timbre and pitch—remain comparatively underexplored. Many comparative studies still rely on simplified stimuli, such as pure tones, which may limit our understanding of how non-human animals perceive melodic structure. Recent findings suggest that pitch and timbre do not map uniformly across species, inviting us to rethink how these percepts are studied.

We therefore deliberately shifted attention away from rhythm perception and production toward the perceptual and affective dimensions of melody, harmony, and timbre. In doing so, we revisited Darwin’s idea that animals may not only perceive melodies, but may also take pleasure in them (see workshop proposal).

What made this workshop especially rewarding was the remarkable diversity of backgrounds and expertise in the room. Researchers from neurobiology, psychology, ethnomusicology, musicology, and evolutionary theory came together to examine the evolutionary and perceptual roles of pitch, timbre, and consonance. This breadth of perspectives allowed us to explore how these percepts vary across species, cultures, and contexts in ways no single discipline could address alone.

By bringing together such a broad and inspiring group of researchers, the workshop generated new insights, strengthened interdisciplinary collaborations, and laid the groundwork for a more coherent framework on the evolution and cognition of musicality.

A special issue is planned for Spring 2027, in which we will summarize the workshop’s findings, develop new research ideas, and outline a future agenda for musicality research.

Photo credits: (cc) 2026 Bas Cornelissen and Lorentz Center.

If musicality did not arise from language, where did it come from?

2026-02-01T20:58:00.029+01:00

Recent interdisciplinary advances have transformed the study of the evolution of music. Rather than treating music as a cultural artifact, current research targets musicality — the biological capacity enabling humans to perceive, produce, and enjoy structured sound. Evidence from observations of infants, cross-cultural studies, and neuroscience shows that humans possess innate predispositions for rhythm, pitch, and temporal expectation that arise independently of training. Comparative studies have revealed that components of musicality have distinct evolutionary histories: primate research supports gradual development of rhythmic and audiomotor integration, while convergent traits in vocal-learning species highlight shared biological constraints. Neuropsychological and developmental findings have further shown that musicality is not reducible to language, drawing instead on perceptual, motor, and affective systems that likely predate speech. Collectively, these insights establish musicality as a fundamental cognitive capacity and provide a robust framework for investigating how its components evolved, how they function across species, and why music is central to human life.

But, if musicality did not arise from language, where did it come from?

[Published in Current Biology as Honing (2026)]

Honing, H. (2026) The biology of musicality. Current Biology, 36(5), R177-R180;
Preprint DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/j8x4w_v6;
Drawing courtesy of Marianne de Heer Kloots (mdhk.net).

No progress since Darwin and Spencer?

2026-01-03T12:35:00.011+01:00

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; A preprint is available at OSF.

References

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).
W. T. Fitch, Four principles of bio-musicology. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 370, 197–202 (2015).
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).
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).
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).
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).
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).
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).
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).
V. G. Rajendran, L. Prado, J. Pablo Marquez, H. Merchant, Monkeys have rhythm. Science (1979) 390, 940–944 (2025).
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).
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).
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?

2025-12-23T19:43:00.024+01:00

[This text is based on a column

delivered at SPUI25 on 4 November 2025]

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.

Musical Animals: Are we? Can there be?

2025-11-24T12:23:00.026+01:00

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]

2025-11-07T20:13:00.002+01:00

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?

2025-11-06T13:14:00.013+01:00

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?

2025-10-03T11:48:00.004+02:00

[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).

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]

2025-09-11T17:39:00.006+02:00

[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]

2025-09-08T11:41:00.002+02:00

Een video short van de Universiteit van Nederland.

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

2025-09-02T11:40:00.001+02:00

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]

2025-08-31T13:58:00.003+02:00

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

Why does a well-tuned modern piano not sound out-of-tune?

2025-08-28T14:18:00.005+02:00

Karlheinz Stockhausen is listening.

"Neue Musik ist anstrengend", wrote Die Zeit some time ago: "Der seit Pythagoras’ Zeiten unternommene Versuch, angenehme musikalische Klänge auf ganzzahlige Frequenzverhältnisse der Töne zurückzuführen, ist schon mathematisch zum Scheitern verurteilt. Außereuropäische Kulturen beweisen schließlich, dass unsere westliche Tonskala genauso wenig naturgegeben ist wie eine auf Dur und Moll beruhende Harmonik: Die indonesische Gamelan-Musik und Indiens Raga-Skalen klingen für europäische Ohren schräg."

The definition of music as “sound” wrongly suggests that music, like all natural phenomena, adheres to the laws of nature. In this case, the laws would be the acoustical patterns of sound such as the (harmonic) relationships in the structure of the dominant tones, which determine the timbre. This is an idea that has preoccupied primarily the mathematically oriented music scientists, from Pythagoras to Hermann von Helmholtz.

The first, and oldest, of these scientists, Pythagoras, observed, for example, that “beautiful” consonant intervals consist of simple frequency relationships (such as 2:3 or 3:4). Several centuries later, Galileo Galilei wrote that complex frequency relationships only “tormented” the eardrum.

But, for all their wisdom, Pythagoras, Galilei, and like-minded thinkers got it wrong. In music, the “beautiful,” so-called “whole-number” frequency relationships rarely occur—in fact, only when a composer dictates them. The composer often even has to have special instruments built to achieve them, as American composer Harry Partch did in the twentieth century.

Contemporary pianos are tuned in such a way that the sounds produced only approximate all those beautiful “natural” relationships. The tones of the instrument do not have simple whole number ratios, as in 2:3 or 3:4. Instead, they are tuned so that every octave is divided into twelve equal parts (a compromise to facilitate changes of key). The tones exist, therefore, not as whole number ratios of each other, but as multiples of 12√2 (1:1.05946).

According to Galilei, each and every one of these frequency relationships are “a torment” to the ear. But modern listeners experience them very differently. They don’t particularly care how an instrument is tuned, otherwise many a concertgoer would walk out of a piano recital because the piano sounded out of tune. It seems that our ears adapt quickly to “dissonant” frequencies. One might even conclude that whether a piano is “in tune” or “out of tune” is entirely irrelevant to our appreciation of music.

[fragment from Honing, 2021; Published here earlier in 2012]

Honing, H. (2012). Een vertelling. In S. van der Maas, C. Hulshof, & P. Oldenhave (Eds.), Liber Plurum Vocum voor Rokus de Groot (pp. 150-154). Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam (ISBN 978-90-818488-0-0).Honing, H. (2021). Music Cognition: The Basics. Routledge. doi 10.4324/9781003158301Kursell, Julia (2011). Kräftespiel. Zur Dissymmetrie von Schall und Wahrnehmung. Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 2 (1), 24-40 DOI: 10.4472_zfmw.2010.0003Whalley, Ian. (2006). William A. Sethares: Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale (Second Edition). Computer Music Journal, 30 (2) DOI: 10.1162/comj.2006.30.2.92

What makes two melodies feel like the same song? [in 333 words]

2025-08-27T18:57:00.018+02:00

(cf. Krumhansl, 1989).

One of the most intriguing questions in music cognition research is also one of the simplest: when are two melodies experienced as the same?

At first glance, the answer might seem obvious — they share the same notes, in the same order, with the same rhythm. But a closer look, across cultures and even across species, reveals a more complex picture. What our brains latch onto when recognizing a tune involves a web of spectral percepts — the fundamental features of sound that guide humans and other animals in interpreting auditory patterns. This may sound like a niche research topic, but it lies at the heart of debates about authorship, originality, and musical ownership.

Consider hearing a melody played in a different key or on an unfamiliar instrument. Most people can still recognize it. How is this possible? Explanations often point to intervallic structure — the sequence of pitch intervals between notes — the contour, which is the overall shape of a melody as it rises and falls, or timbre, often described as the “color” of sound, including brightness, texture, and loudness.

For decades, music research treated timbre as secondary — something layered over supposedly “meaningful” musical features like pitch and rhythm (cf. McAdams & Cunible, 1992). Increasing evidence now suggests timbre is not merely decorative but a core perceptual building block. Timbre may also support “relative listening,” the ability to track patterns of change across different features. Exploring it carefully could reveal flexible and universal aspects of music cognition previously underestimated.

Recognizing that humans and non-human animals may rely on different spectral cues is equally crucial for understanding music’s evolutionary roots. A melody meaningful to humans may not register as such for a zebra finch — and vice versa.

By broadening music cognition research to include timbre, spectral contour, and species-specific strategies, scientists hope to uncover the shared perceptual foundations of musicality. Such work moves us closer to answering a deceptively simple but deeply complex question: what truly makes two melodies feel like the same song?

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

References

McAdams, S, & Cunible, J-C (1992). Perception of timbral analogies. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 336, 383-389.

Krumhansl, C. L. (1989). Why is musical timbre so hard to understand? In S. Nielzén & O. Olsson (Eds.), Structure and perception of electroacoustic sound and music (pp. 43– 53). Elsevier.

Want to test your musical memory?

2025-07-12T19:44:00.009+02:00

Test your musical memory! A beta version of #TuneTwins is now online at https://tunetwins.app.

Note: Some things may still not work perfectly here and there. Please let us know via the feedback button – it helps us a lot!

Big thanks to Jiaxin, Noah, Bas, Ashley, Berit and the Music Cognition Group at large !

What do Bach, bipedalism and a baby crying have in common?

2025-06-18T15:31:00.005+02:00

Human beings seem to have an innate sense of both rhythm and time, but how much is it biological and how much is it cultural?

Feel free to join the BètaBreak on June 20th between 12:00 and 13:30 at Science Park 904, Amsterdam, to explore the relationship between music and time in an interdisciplinary discussion with insights from biology, evolution, musicology and philosophy with speakers from the University of Amsterdam, the University of Liverpool and the University of Oslo!

Music in our genes?

2025-05-19T17:28:00.000+02:00

"In 1984, a curious study on musicality in animals was published. The researchers from Portland, Oregon trained pigeons to distinguish two pieces of music – one by Bach, the other by Stravinsky. If the birds got it right, they were rewarded with food. Afterwards, the same pigeons were exposed to new pieces of music from the same composers. Surprisingly, they were still able to determine which piece was composed by which composer.

This finding confronted researchers with a new set of questions. To what extent are animals musical? What does it even mean for an animal to be musical? And what can this teach us about musicality in humans?"

(From Music in our genes, ILLC Blog).

The interview is based on an episode of the podcast “Talk that Science” – an initiative started by students from the University of Amsterdam.

• Listen to the episode here (in Dutch);

• Link to the English transcript can be found here.

What is the use of the comparative approach in studying the origins of language and music?

2025-04-24T11:47:00.001+02:00

Diagrammatic representation of the comparative
approach (as discussed in ten Cate & Honing, 2022/2025)

Comparative studies can be done in several ways. One approach is to examine the sounds made by animals and look for shared features or parallels with language or music. To study these, one can, for example, examine how the structure of a sequence of sounds compares to syntactic structures in language or rhythmic structures in music, or whether harmonic sounds are recognized by their pitch (like in music) or by their spectral structure (like in speech). The presence of such features can indicate that similar sensory or cognitive mechanisms may underlie their perception and production and those needed for language and music in humans. However, one needs to be cautious with drawing such conclusions. That a sound produced by an animal has certain features in common with language or music may be incidental and a result of human interpretation, rather than indicating shared mechanisms per se. Animal sounds showing, for example, a specific rhythmic pattern (e.g., in the call of the indri, a lemur species; De Gregorio et al., 2021) or that contain tones based on a harmonic series (e.g., in the hermit thrush; Doolittle et al., 2014), need not indicate an ability of the animal to perceive or produce rhythms or harmonic sounds in general, as is common in humans. To show this, it is necessary to demonstrate the perception or production of such patterns outside and beyond what is realized in the species-specific sound patterns. This requires a second approach: using controlled experiments to address whether animals can (learn to) distinguish and generalize artificially constructed sounds that differ in specific linguistic or musical features. The two approaches, observational-analytical and experimental, are complementary: the first one may hint at presence of a certain ability, while the second one can test its existence and the limits of the capacity (Adapted from: ten Cate & Honing, 2025).

De Gregorio, C., Valente, D., Raimondi, T., Torti, V., Miaretsoa, L., Friard, O., Giacoma, C., Ravignani, A. & Gamba, M. (2021). Categorical rhythms in a singing primate. Current Biology, 31(20), R1379–R1380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.09.032

Doolittle, E. L., Gingras, B., Endres, D. M. & Fitch, W. T. (2014). Overtone-based pitch selection in hermit thrush song: Unexpected convergence with scale construction in human music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 11(46), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1406023111

Ten Cate, C. & & Honing, H. (2025). Precursors of Music and Language in Animals. Sammler, D. (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Language and Music Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192894700.013.0026. Preprint: psyarxiv.com/4zxtr.

Wetenschap in de blogosfeer? [Dutch]

2025-04-01T10:46:00.000+02:00

Uit De bloggende wetenschap (Folia), over Music Matters | A blog on music cognition:

"Ik weet niet direct wat muziekcognitie is, maar dat is geen probleem. Dit is een prima blog, gemaakt door een vakidioot die zo te zien met liefde over het onderwerp schrijft. Hij blogt niet veel, niet eens een keer per week, maar wel uitgebreid en nauwkeurig. En voor hem is het voordeel dat hij nu gedwongen is te schrijven, het proces van zijn onderzoek met zijn volgers te delen en zijn gedachten te structureren en te verwoorden."

Interested in a challenging postdoc position in Amsterdam?

2024-11-06T13:32:00.002+01:00

MCG in November 2024.

We are currently looking for a postdoc researcher that likes to work on the intersection of music cognition, biology, and the cognitive sciences. If you are excited about doing this kind of research in an interdisciplinary environment, with a team of smart and friendly colleagues, then you may want to join us.

More information, including details on how to apply, will be made available soon at our website.

Deadline for applications : 1 December 2024.

Interested in doing a PhD in Music Cognition?

2024-10-22T11:57:00.004+02:00

Master students of the UvA (or excellent external candidates) are invited to submit a short proposal to be selected as a candidate for NWO's PhD in the Humanities programme.

At the ILLC there will be a pre-selection procedure based on a short proposal and cv. More information for excellent candidates is available here.

Deadline for pre-proposals: 03 November 2024.

The aim of the PhDs in the Humanities funding instrument is to increase the number of young talented researchers in the humanities, and to facilitate their progression on the academic career ladder. See NWO website for more information.