Darwin’s concept of evolution as “descent with modification” emphasised branching diversification into separate lineages, which can then become adapted to diverse ecological niches without any being necessarily “more” or “less” evolved than the other (Figure 5.2B).3

To truly understand the evolutionary origins of musicality or language, we cannot study them independently but must compare both human song and human speech across a wide variety of species and cultures.

phylogenetic comparative analysis

beat synchronisation) that have traditionally been thought of as “absent” in non-human animals

Subjective listening experiments show an interesting mix of agreement and disagreement among listeners, which can help or hinder analyses depending on their goal. Western staff notation is useful for precise comparison of related melodies, but often not well-suited for comparing across cultures. Cantometrics is well-suited for broad cross-cultural comparison, but less well-suited for comparing fine-grained differences within cultures or very broad comparisons between human and animal vocalisations. Automatic analyses allow for more detailed and objective comparisons of music and speech, but struggle to capture some of the complexities of polyphonic music and extract features such as scale tunings from the imprecision found in real singing. And we haven’t even touched on more sophisticated automated methods (e.g., Music Information Retrieval Toolbox [Lartillot et al., 2008]; Essentia [Bogdanov et al., 2013]; Librosa [McFee et al., 2015])16 or other comparative methods such as qualitative analysis or approaches based on Indigenous knowledge (for a very brief glimpse of those, see the Epilogue).

subjective listening experiments

“in the conceptualization, design, conduct or publication of the research,”

but our data is almost entirely filtered through the ears, brains, and epistemologies of the predominantly Western researchers and listeners who have converted the audio recordings into standardised formats like Cantometric codings or transcriptions in staff notation.

in 1835, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called music ‘the universal language of mankind.’ he turned out to have been right.”

Honing (2018) defines musicality as “a natural, spontaneously developing set of traits based on and constrained by our cognitive and biological system.

Biological studies of musicality continue a long tradition emphasising relationships between human music, human language, and animal vocalisation

cross-species framework