This article was originally featured in MIT Press.
Back in 2009, my research group made an exciting discovery: newborns are able to pick up and understand a regular pulse, or beat, in music. While some may think this is a simple skill, it is actually fundamental to the creation and enjoyment of music. This discovery led me on a fascinating journey to explore the biological basis of our natural ability for music, known as “musicality.” You can read more in my book “The Origins of Musicality.”
Our groundbreaking experiment
Music isn’t just a cultural development; it also has deep biological roots, providing an evolutionary advantage to our species. Of course, with any discovery comes skepticism. Colleagues questioned our interpretation of the findings, proposing alternative explanations rooted in the physical nature of the sounds we used. Others suggested that the observed reactions were simply a result of statistical learning, challenging the idea that beat perception is a distinct mechanism essential for our musical abilities. After all, infants engage in statistical learning when learning a new language. So, why should music be any different? To confront these challenges, in 2015, our group revisited and expanded our previous beat perception study, including not only newborns, but also adults (both musicians and non-musicians) and macaque monkeys. The results, published last month in Cognition, left no doubt that beat perception is distinct from statistical learning. This study provided further proof of newborns’ beat perception abilities, solidifying our initial findings. When we applied the same methods to macaque monkeys in 2018, we discovered that there was no evidence of beat processing, only a sensitivity to the regularity of the rhythms. This suggests that beat perception evolved gradually among primates, reaching its peak in humans and showing up with limitations in other species like chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates. This supports the Gradual Audiomotor Evolution (GAE) hypothesis outlined in my 2019 book, “The Evolving Animal Orchestra,” which delves into the similarities and differences in rhythm perception and production between human and nonhuman primates.