What is the general question or issue that motivated the study? 2. What is the specific question or hypothesis that the experime

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 1999, 6 (4), 641-646

A song’s identity is specified by its pitch and rhythmic structure. Accordingly, these structures have been the primary focus of psychological research on music (e.g., Jones & Yee, 1993; Krumhansl, 1990). Songs are a par- ticularly interesting domain of study because their iden- tity is determined from abstracted information about re- lations between tones, rather than from the tones’ absolute characteristics. For example, the frequency (pitch) of the initial tone of “Happy Birthday” can be selected arbitrar- ily, but the song will retain its identity if the relations (in- tervals) between tones are preserved. Hence, regardless of whether a song is sung with a high or a low voice, it is recognizable if its intervallic structure is maintained. Dif- ferences in tone durations (rhythm) work similarly. Songs can be sung fast or slow and still be recognized (within limits; see Warren, Gardner, Brubaker, & Bashford, 1991), if the durational differences between consecutive tones maintain the correct ratios.

By contrast, the sound quality of musical instruments (timbre) is irrelevant to a song’s identity. “Happy Birthday” is recognizable regardless of whether it is played on a trombone or a piano. Timbre is typically defined by what

it is not: characteristics of sounds other than pitch, dura- tion, or amplitude (see, e.g., Dowling & Harwood, 1986; Hajda, Kendall, Carterette, & Harshberger, 1997). Whereas these parameters can be measured on ordinal scales, tim- bre is multidimensional and diff icult to def ine (Hajda et al., 1997). Nonetheless, we know that listeners’ per- ception of timbre is a function of static attributes of tones, such as the steady state frequency distribution of har- monics, and of dynamic or time-varying attributes, such as changes in harmonics at tone onsets (see, e.g., Grey, 1977; Iverson & Krumhansl, 1993; McAdams, Wins- berg, Donnadieu, De Soete, & Krimphoff, 1995; Pitt & Crowder, 1992).

Although a song’s identity is defined by relational in- formation, this does not preclude the possibility that ab- solute information about pitch, tempo, or timbre is also stored in auditory memory. Absolute attributes of voices (e.g., pitch and timbre) are irrelevant to a word’s identity, yet talker identity is stored in episodic memory for words (Nygaard & Pisoni, 1998; Nygaard, Sommers, & Pisoni, 1994; Palmeri, Goldinger, & Pisoni, 1993). In the exper- iments conducted by Pisoni and his colleagues, partici- pants typically heard a list of words spoken by different talkers and were asked to identify words that had been presented previously in the list. Consistent with the prin- ciple of encoding specificity (Tulving & Thomson, 1973), recognition was best if the same talker said the word both times, but relatively poor when the repeated word was said by a different talker. Voice recognition may be somewhat unique, however, in that listeners appear to rely on differ- ent cues for different speakers; for example, some famous voices are recognized equally well when they are pre- sented backward or forward, presumably because listeners

641 Copyright 1999 Psychonomic Society, Inc.

Funding for this research was provided by a grant awarded to the first author from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. We thank Dennis Phillips for extensive discussions about all aspects of the study, Susan Hall for her assistance in preparing Figure 1, and Andrea Halpern, Dan Levitin, John Wixted, and an anonymous re- viewer for their insightful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to E. G. Schellenberg, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto at Mis- sissauga, Mississauga, ON, L5L 1C6, Canada (e-mail: [email protected] utoronto.ca).

Name that tune: Identifying popular recordings from brief excerpts

E. GLENN SCHELLENBERG University of Toronto, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

PAUL IVERSON University of Washington, Seattle, Washington

and

MARGARET C. MCKINNON University of Toronto, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

We tested listeners’ ability to identify brief excerpts from popular recordings. Listeners were required to match 200- or 100-msec excerpts with the song titles and artists. Performance was well above chance levels for 200-msec excerpts and poorer but still better than chance for 100-msec excerpts. Perfor- mance fell to chance levels when dynamic (time-varying) information was disrupted by playing the 100-msec excerpts backward and when high-frequency information was omitted from the 100-msec excerpts; performance was unaffected by the removal of low-frequency information. In sum, success- ful identification required the presence of dynamic, high-frequency spectral information.

642 SCHELLENBERG, IVERSON, AND MCKINNON

are using cues other than those based on dynamic spectral information (Van Lancker, Kreiman, & Emmorey, 1985).

Absolute attributes also play an important role in memory for popular recordings, despite their irrelevance to a song’s identity. When respondents are asked to sing short passages from well-known recordings, they tend to do so at a pitch (Levitin, 1994) and tempo (Levitin & Cook, 1996) that closely approximate those of the origi- nal recordings. Anecdotal evidence indicates that listen- ers can recognize songs rapidly when scanning through radio stations for a song that they like or when participat- ing in radio contests (e.g., “Name that Tune”) that require identification of brief excerpts of recordings. Although it is possible that the limited relational information avail- able in these segments is sufficient for recognition, we suggest that such recognition relies more on absolute in- formation based primarily on timbre rather than on pitch or tempo. (Timbre can also refer to the global sound qual- ity of the recording and orchestration of a particular song.) Indeed, listeners’ ability to perceive differences in timbre is remarkable. For example, sequences of 10-msec tones with identical pitch but different timbres can be dis- tinguished from comparison sequences with the same tones played in a different order (Warren et al., 1991). Moreover, specific musical instruments can be identified in forced-choice tasks involving tones of similarly short durations (Robinson & Patterson, 1995a).

In the present investigation, listeners were asked to identify excerpts from recordings of popular songs that were too brief to contain any relational information. We selected five recordings that were highly popular in North America in the months preceding data collection and, therefore, likely to be familiar to undergraduates. Our goal was twofold: (1) to explore the limits of listeners’ abil- ity to identify recordings from very brief excerpts and (2) to identify stimulus attributes necessary for success- ful identification. Although our excerpts contained ab- solute information about pitch and timbre, their brevity (100 or 200 msec) precluded the possibility of identify- ing words or multiple tones presented successively. Our hypothesis was that listeners would rely on timbre more than on absolute pitch in these brief contexts. Accord- ingly, the excerpts were altered in some conditions, to ex- amine which attributes were important for identification. Specifically, we altered the distribution of frequencies in the harmonic spectrum through high-pass (frequencies < 1000 Hz attenuated) and low-pass (frequencies > 1000 Hz attenuated) filtering and the dynamic information by play- ing the excerpts backward. These alterations affected the timbre of the excerpts but had little impact on their per- ceived pitch. Thus, differential responding across condi- tions would indicate listeners’ greater reliance on timbre than on absolute pitch.

METHOD

Participants The listeners were 100 undergraduates enrolled in psychology

courses at a medium-sized Canadian university located a few miles

from downtown Detroit. Participation in the experiment took ap- proximately 20 min, for which the students received partial course credit. An additional 10 listeners were recruited but excluded from the testing session for failing to meet the inclusion criterion (see the Procedure section).

Apparatus and Stimulus Materials We searched through “HOT 100” charts in Billboard magazine to

select five recordings that were highly popular in North America in the months preceding data collection: (1) “Because You Loved Me,” performed by Celine Dion; (2) “Exhale (Shoop Shoop),” performed by Whitney Houston; (3) “Macarena,” performed by Los Del Rios; (4) “Missing,” performed by Everything But the Girl; and (5) “One Sweet Day,” performed by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men. The ex- tensive airplay accorded these songs ensured that it was likely that anyone who had listened to popular music during this period had been exposed to all of them. The recordings were purchased on com- pact disc. An excerpt from each disc was digitally copied onto the hard disk of a Macintosh PowerPC 7100/66AV computer in 16-bit format (sampling rate of 22.05 kHz) using the SoundEdit 16 soft- ware program. Excerpt onsets were chosen to be maximally repre- sentative of the recordings (experimenters’ judgment); each started on a downbeat at the beginning of a bar. One of the excerpts (“Maca- rena”) contained no vocals.1

There were five experimental conditions. In one condition, the excerpts were 200 msec in duration; this duration was selected so that the task would be challenging but not impossible. In a second condition, the excerpts were shortened to 100 msec by deleting the second half. Frequency spectra at 50 msec from excerpt onsets are illustrated in Figure 1. In a third condition, the 100-msec excerpts were played backward (as in Van Lancker et al., 1985), which dis- rupted the dynamic information but had no effect on the static (steady state) information. In the remaining two conditions, the orig- inal (forward) 100-msec excerpts were high-pass or low-pass filtered (following D. L. Halpern, Blake, & Hillenbrand, 1986, but with a cutoff frequency of 1000 Hz, similar to Compton, 1963), using the SoundEdit program.2 The stimuli were presented to the listeners binaurally via headphones (Sony CD 550) at a comfortable listening level. Inclusion of 10-msec onset and offset ramps proved to be un- detectable to the experimenters, so the excerpts were not ramped.

Procedure The listeners were tested individually; 20 were assigned to each

of five conditions. They wore headphones and sat in front of the computer monitor in a quiet room. A SoundEdit file was open on the computer, which allowed the listeners to see the waveforms for each of the five excerpts. (None of the listeners reported any famil- iarity with waveforms.) The order of the waveforms was random- ized separately for each condition. To hear an excerpt, the listeners used a mouse connected to the computer and clicked on one of the waveforms. The listeners were provided with an answer sheet that listed the five artists and song titles (alphabetical order) and were required to match the five excerpts with the five songs on the an- swer sheet. This method differed from multiple-choice tasks in that the five judgments from any individual listener were not indepen- dent (e.g., one error ensured another error). The listeners were allowed to hear the test excerpts repeatedly and in any order they chose.

Prior to the test session, the participants were informed that there would be a pretest, to verify that they were familiar with the five songs used in the experiment. Because many of the students might have been familiar with the recordings but not with the names of the songs, the pretest also served to familiarize or refamiliarize the par- ticipants with the song titles and artists, as was required in the sub- sequent experiment. The pretest involved presenting a single 20-sec excerpt from each of the recordings and requiring listeners to match the five excerpts with the five song titles and artists, as in the actual experiment. The vocals in these excerpts did not reveal the titles of the songs, and the 20-sec excerpts did not contain the excerpts used

IDENTIFYING POPULAR RECORDINGS 643

in the actual experiment. Only listeners who scored 100% were in- cluded in the final sample, but all the participants received course credit, even if they failed to meet the inclusion criterion. The listen- ers were tested individually or in small groups during the screening process. A delay of several minutes between the screening session and the actual experiment prevented the listeners from retaining a representation of the excerpts in working memory.

RESULTS

For each condition, there were 120 (5 ! 4 ! 3 ! 2 ! 1) possible response combinations, each of which was equally likely if the listeners were guessing. The average number of correct responses for these 120 possibilities was one. Because the distribution of scores (number correct) based on chance levels of responding was not normal, the data were analyzed with nonparametric tests. Individual listeners were classified according to whether or not they performed better than chance (score > 1 or score ≤ 1). The probability of getting more than one correct response (two, three, or five correct)3 was 31/120 if listeners were guessing. Thus, only about 1 in 4 listeners (i.e., 5.17 out of 20 in each condition) should score better than chance, if listeners as a group were guessing. Figure 2 illustrates the number of listeners who performed above chance sep- arately for each condition. Mean scores for each condition

(provided below the figure) make it clear that dichoto- mizing the outcome variable did not affect the overall re- sponse pattern.

Chi-square goodness-of-fit tests were used separately for each condition, to examine whether the number of listeners with scores greater than 1 exceeded chance levels. Performance was much better than chance in the 200- msec condition [c2(1, n " 20) " 49.89, p < .001], with 19 of 20 listeners performing above chance. Group re- sponding remained above chance for the even briefer 100-msec stimuli [c2 (1, n " 20) " 8.87, p < .005]. Per- formance was also better than chance in the 100-msec high-pass filtered condition [c2 (1, n " 20) " 15.99, p < .001], but not in the low-pass filtered or backward con- ditions. A chi-square test of independence confirmed that the number of listeners performing above chance differed across conditions [c2 (4, N " 100) " 30.29, p < .001].

Performance in the 200-msec condition was superior to levels observed in the 100-msec condition [c2 (1, n " 40) " 8.53, p < .005]. This effect was evident for each of the five recordings and implies that successful identifi- cation of the recordings required the presence of dynamic information in the frequency spectrum, because the sta- tic (steady state) information and the absolute pitch of the excerpts would have been very similar for the 200-

Frequency (kHz)

R el

at iv

e A

m pl

itu de

( dB

)

0 2 4 6 8 10

One Sweet Day

Because You Loved Me

Exhale (Shoop Shoop)

Macarena

Missing

20 dB=

Figure 1. Relative amplitude of frequencies between 0 and 10 kHz in the unfiltered, forward excerpts. Spectra were derived using linear predictive coding (LPC) at 50 msec after the onset of each excerpt.

644 SCHELLENBERG, IVERSON, AND MCKINNON

and the 100-msec excerpts. This hypothesis was tested directly in the next comparison, which showed that per- formance was poorer in the backward 100-msec condition than it was in the forward 100-msec condition [c2 (1, n " 40) " 5.23, p < .05]. This decrement was evident for four of the five songs (all but “One Sweet Day”). Because sta- tic spectral information and absolute pitch were exactly the same in these two conditions, inferior performance with the backward excerpts provides confirmation of lis- teners’ reliance on dynamic information in the frequency spectrum.

In the next set of analyses, differences in performance as a function of the presence of low-frequency or high- frequency information were examined. Performance in the high-pass filtered condition was no different from levels observed in the original 100-msec condition; the number of listeners scoring above chance increased for two songs (“Because You Loved Me” and “Missing”), decreased for two songs (“Exhale” and “Macarena”), and remained un- changed for one song (“One Sweet Day”). Signif icant performance decrements were observed, however, in the low-pass condition, as compared with the original 100- msec and the high-pass conditions [c2 (1, n " 60) " 6.54, p < .05]; indeed, the low-pass condition had the fewest above-chance listeners for all the songs but one (“One Sweet Day”). Thus, successful identification of the ex- cerpts depended on the presence of high-frequency, but not on low-frequency, spectral information.

To examine the possibility that listeners were relying solely on vocal cues, rather than the timbre of the overall recordings, we examined song-by-song responding for each of the three conditions in which performance was bet- ter than chance. In each condition, absolute levels of per- formance were highest for the excerpt that did not con- tain any vocals (“Macarena”).

DISCUSSION

Our listeners were able to identify recordings of pop- ular songs from excerpts as brief as 0.1 sec, provided that dynamic, high-frequency information from the record- ings was present in the excerpts. The observed pattern of findings cannot be attributed to absolute-pitch cues or to recognition of specific voices. Rather, the spectra in Fig- ure 1 show that the excerpt with the highest levels of per- formance (“Macarena,” no vocals) had the densest concen- tration of energy between 1000 and 8000 Hz, which may have contributed to its relative distinctiveness. Listeners may also have been more familiar with “Macarena” than with the other recordings.

Listeners’ ability to identify complex musical stimuli from a minimal amount of perceptual information is sim- ilar to their abilities with speech. For example, 10-msec vowels can be identified reliably (Robinson & Patterson, 1995b; Suen & Beddoes, 1972), as can individual voices from vowel samples as brief as 25 msec (Compton, 1963).

0

5

10

15

20

200 ms 100 ms 100 msbackward 100 ms

high-pass 100 ms

low-pass Mean: 3.45 1.70 1.00 1.90 1.20

Li st

en er

s A

bo ve

C ha

nc e

Figure 2. Number of listeners exceeding chance levels (>1 correct response) for each testing condition (ns " 20). Hatched bars indicate conditions in which group perfor- mance was significantly better than chance. Mean scores (number of songs identified correctly) are provided below the figure.

IDENTIFYING POPULAR RECORDINGS 645

When respondents are asked to identify famous voices from a set of 60 different voices, performance starts to ex- ceed chance levels with samples of 250 msec (Schwein- berger, Herholz, & Sommer, 1997). The capacity to iden- tify speech stimuli from a minimal amount of information appears to be general enough to extend to other auditory domains—such as music—where the adaptive signif i- cance is much less obvious (Roederer, 1984). Although our findings do not imply that recognition of popular songs typically occurs in 100 msec, they provide unequivocal evidence that excerpts this brief contain information that can be used for identification. Moreover, our results re- veal that such information is timbral in nature and inde- pendent of absolute-pitch cues or changes in pitch and tone durations.

Our results extend those of Levitin (1994; Levitin & Cook, 1996; see, also, A. R. Halpern, 1989), who reported that memory representations for popular recordings con- tain absolute information about pitch and tempo. With very brief presentations, however, identification of re- cordings is primarily a function of timbre rather than of absolute pitch or tempo. Although information about tempo was unavailable in our brief excerpts, pitch is per- ceptible from tones as brief as 10 msec (Warren et al., 1991). Nonetheless, performance was at chance when our 100-msec excerpts were played backward or low-pass fil- tered. Because both manipulations would have dramati- cally disrupted attributes that are critical to timbre (dy- namic and static information, respectively) while having little impact on perceived pitch, it appears that timbre is more important than absolute pitch for identifying pop- ular recordings from very brief excerpts. This finding con- verges with others involving music and speech, which show that timbre (i.e., a specific musical instrument or vowel) is better identified than is pitch when stimuli are extremely brief (Robinson & Patterson, 1995a, 1995b).

The listeners’ dependence on timbre rather than on ab- solute pitch in the present investigation could stem from (1) the importance of timbral cues (i.e., voice qualities other than pitch) in speech, (2) the relative unimportance of absolute, as compared with relative pitch in music lis- tening, or (3) both of these factors. Although voices vary in pitch as well as in timbre, differences in pitch (i.e., av- erage fundamental frequency) between talkers of the same sex are relatively small; in a group of 12 women tested by Miller (1983), the SD was less than 2.5 semitones. None- theless, most people can rapidly identify many different female (or male) voices, despite similarities in pitch. Be- cause of the multidimensional nature of timbre, voice- quality cues are more distinctive than those based on pitch. Extensive experience discriminating voices on the basis of timbre could, in turn, influence processing in the musi- cal domain.

We also know that the ability to perceive musical pitch in an absolute manner is limited to a relatively small pro- portion of the population (approximately 1 in 10,000; see Takeuchi & Hulse, 1993). Absolute-pitch possessors can

identify a note by name (e.g., C, F♯, etc.) when it is played in isolation (an ability that is qualitatively different than remembering the pitch of a recording). Because such ab- solute-identification abilities tend to be automatic, they can interfere with relational processing strategies that are more relevant to music listening (Miyazaki, 1993). More- over, other evidence implies that absolute-pitch process- ing is actually a relatively primitive auditory strategy. For example, elevated prevalence levels have been reported among mentally retarded individuals, and absolute- rather than relative-pitch processing is the norm for nonhuman vertebrates (Ward & Burns, 1982).

At present, it is unclear why the portion of the spectrum above 1000 Hz is more important for song recognition than the portion below 1000 Hz. The high-pass filtered excerpts differed quantitatively from the low-pass ex- cerpts (e.g., they had more spectral information, because most of the harmonics in the excerpts were above 1000 Hz; see Figure 1), and qualitative differences may also have played a role (e.g., the high frequencies may have been more distinctive). It is also possible that high-frequency timbral information is either perceived or encoded in mem- ory with better detail, as compared with low-frequency information. Interestingly, Compton (1963) used speech samples that were low-pass and high-pass filtered much like our musical excerpts (cutoff frequency of 1020 Hz, rather than 1000 Hz) and reported results similar to ours. His respondents, who were asked to identify the talker, showed marked deficits in performance for low-pass fil- tered samples, but not for high-pass samples.

Performance levels in the present study were undoubt- edly inflated by two factors: (1) allowing the excerpts to be heard repeatedly, which would have enhanced percep- tual fluency for the repeated items (Jacoby & Dallas, 1981), and (2) the pretest session, which would have primed listeners’ memories of the songs. Indeed, exposure to the pretest excerpts could have allowed above-chance levels of performance to emerge even among listeners who had limited familiarity with the songs prior to the experiment. These listeners may have met the pretest in- clusion criterion by recognizing one or two of the singers, by a process of elimination, by luck, or by a combination of these factors, all of which may have influenced perfor- mance in the subsequent test session as well. Because the listeners received course credit even if they failed to meet the inclusion criterion (which excused them from the test session), however, it is unlikely that they falsely claimed familiarity with the tunes. Moreover, the time frame of the experiment prevented the listeners from retaining one or more of the excerpts in working memory. By defini- tion, then, the task required the listeners to rely primarily on representations in long-term memory of greater or lesser permanence. For example, such representations would be relatively permanent (or consolidated) for lis- teners with extensive familiarity with the tunes, but more temporary (or less consolidated) for other listeners, being retrievable only for the length of the experiment. Regard-

646 SCHELLENBERG, IVERSON, AND MCKINNON

less, the results make it clear that (1) the brief stimuli contained information that listeners could compare with their representations of the recordings and (2) this infor- mation was primarily timbral in nature. Future research could examine the generalizability of these findings with a broader selection of excerpts and a less constrained task. For example, different results might be obtained with re- cordings of soft-rock tunes or orchestral symphonies or with individual recordings in which the overall timbre is less distinctive. Representations that vary in degree of con- solidation could also differ in the way timbre is encoded.

It is important to clarify that absolute attributes in mem- ory representations for popular songs would be stored in combination with the relational information that defines the songs. Adult, child, and infant listeners recognize sim- ilarities between sequences of pure tones presented in transposition (different absolute pitch, same pitch and tem- poral relations; Schellenberg & Trehub, 1996a, 1996b). It is safe to assume, then, that our listeners would recog- nize previously unheard versions of, say, “Macarena,” per- formed by different singers, on different instruments, and in a key and tempo different from the original recording. Nonetheless, our results provide converging evidence that memory representations for complex auditory stimuli contain information about the absolute properties of the stimuli, in addition to more meaningful information ab- stracted from the relations between stimulus components. Indeed, in contexts with an extremely limited amount of information, listeners may rely primarily on the sound quality of the stimuli for successful identification and recognition.

REFERENCES

Compton, A. J. (1963). Effects of filtering and vocal duration upon the identification of speakers, aurally. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 35, 1748-1752.

Dowling, W. J., & Harwood, D. L. (1986). Music cognition. San Diego: Academic Press.

Grey, J. M. (1977). Multidimensional perceptual scaling of musical tim- bres. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 61, 1270-1277.

Hajda, J. M., Kendall, R. A., Carterette, E. C., & Harshberger, M. L. (1997). Methodological issues in timbre research. In I. Deliège & J. Sloboda (Eds.), Perception and cognition of music (pp. 253-306). Hove, U.K.: Psychology Press.

Halpern, A. R. (1989). Memory for the absolute pitch of familiar songs. Memory & Cognition, 17, 572-581.

Halpern, D. L., Blake, R., & Hillenbrand, J. (1986). Psychoacous- tics of a chilling sound. Perception & Psychophysics, 39, 77-80.

Iverson, P., & Krumhansl, C. L. (1993). Isolating the dynamic attrib- utes of musical timbre. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 94, 2595-2603.

Jacoby, L. L., & Dallas, M. (1981). On the relationship between auto- biographical memory and perceptual learning. Journal of Experimen- tal Psychology: General, 110, 306-340.

Jones, M. R., & Yee, W. (1993). Attending to auditory events: The role of temporal organization. In S. McAdams & E. Bigand (Eds.), Think- ing in sound: The cognitive psychology of human audition (pp. 69- 112). Oxford: Oxford Universty Press, Clarendon Press.

Krumhansl, C. L. (1990). Cognitive foundations of musical pitch. New York: Oxford University Press.

Levitin, D. J. (1994). Absolute memory for musical pitch: Evidence

from the production of learned melodies. Perception & Psychophysics, 56, 414-423.

Levitin, D. J., & Cook, P. R. (1996). Memory for musical tempo: Addi- tional evidence that auditory memory is absolute. Perception & Psychophysics, 58, 927-935.

McAdams, S., Winsberg, S., Donnadieu, S., De Soete, G., & Krimp- hoff, J. (1995). Perceptual scaling of synthesized musical timbres: Common dimensions, specificities, and latent subject classes. Psy- chological Research, 58, 177-192.

Miller, C. L. (1983). Developmental changes in male/female classifi- cation by infants. Infant Behavior & Development, 6, 313-330.

Miyazaki, K. (1993). …

6

Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1060: 6–16 (2005). © 2005 New York Academy of Sciences. doi: 10.1196/annals.1360.002

Probing the Evolutionary Origins of Music Perception

JOSH MCDERMOTTa AND MARC D. HAUSERb aPerceptual Science Group, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA bCognitive Evolution Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

ABSTRACT: Empirical data have recently begun to inform debates on the evo- lutionary origins of music. In this paper we discuss some of our recent findings and related theoretical issues. We claim that theories of the origins of music will be usefully constrained if we can determine which aspects of music perception are innate, and, of those, which are uniquely human and specific to music. Comparative research in nonhuman animals, particularly nonhuman pri- mates, is thus critical to the debate. In this paper we focus on the preferences that characterize most humans’ experience of music, testing whether similar preferences exist in nonhuman primates. Our research suggests that many rudimentary acoustic preferences, such as those for consonant over dissonant intervals, may be unique to humans. If these preferences prove to be innate in humans, they may be candidates for music-specific adaptations. To establish whether such preferences are innate in humans, one important avenue for fu- ture research will be the collection of data from different cultures. This may be facilitated by studies conducted over the internet.

KEYWORDS: music; preferences; monkey; consonance; evolution; adaptation

INTRODUCTION

From the standpoint of evolutiona

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