subjective listening experiments

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

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

“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.”