We are born with a sense of music, which is innate and can be enhanced by listening to music. Almost everyone has the musical skills necessary to experience and appreciate music. The ability of "relative pitch perception" allows us to identify melody with the help of pitch or rhythm; the ability of "rhythm perception" allows us to find patterns in ever-changing rhythms. Even babies are extremely sensitive to tones, melodies, rhythms or noises around them. All signs indicate that the human body is ready to perceive and enjoy music as early as its birth.
The human sense of music is obviously very special. The sense of music is based on and limited by cognitive abilities (attention, memory, anticipation ability) and biological instincts. It is a series of natural characteristics that form spontaneously. But why is it so special? Is it because only humans seem to have a sense of music? Is it as unique to humans as the ability to speak? Or is it the product of the long-term evolution of all living things?
"My Dog and I Play the Piano":
Music researcher Henkjan Honing suspects that the dog in this viral video does not have absolute pitch (1 A cognitive ability beyond hearing), it is just pressing the keys of the owner's gaze.
Darwin believed that vertebrates can all perceive and appreciate rhythm and melody because they have similar nervous systems. He was convinced that human musicality had a biological basis. In addition, he also believes that sensitivity to music must be a very ancient trait, much older than sensitivity to language. In fact, he believed that musicality was the origin of music and language, and that it was the evolutionary mechanism of sexual selection that gave humans and animals this trait.
So how good is the sense of joy in animals compared to humans? Is musicality unique to humans? Or is it possible, as Darwin suspected, that "the physiological properties of the nervous system" (in humans and animals) are the same, and therefore both have a sense of music? To understand the evolution of music and musicality, we must first determine what the components of music are and how they manifest themselves in animals and humans. Perhaps we can use this to determine whether only humans have a sense of music.
Ivan Pavlov discovered that dogs can remember a certain tone and associate it with food. Wolves, rats, starlings, and rhesus monkeys all recognize each other by the absolute pitch of their calls, and they can also distinguish tones.
Relative pitch is a listening skill. Most people hear not the individual tones and their frequencies within a melody, but the entire melody. Whether the other person sings "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in a high note or a low voice, you can hear the song. Even if you hear a tune coming from a loudspeaker in a noisy café, you can still instantly identify which song it is.
But who sang it? You rack your brains, trying to remember the name of the singer or the name of the song, but your mind goes blank, so you open the song-listening app, point your smartphone at the speaker, and within a few seconds you find the song title, artist, and name. Album to which it belongs.
"Songbirds have certain listening patterns that allow modern composers to give timbre an important role in their works."
In order to make it possible to recognize music by listening to it, software was developed The author has systematically analyzed and efficiently saved most of the commercially available song recordings. Each song has a unique "acoustic fingerprint" that reflects its specific sonic qualities, and these fingerprints are stored in extensive archives. Therefore, the computer program will compare the "fingerprints" of the music received by the smartphone with the music stored in the smartphone, and then listen to the music quickly and effectively. For a computer, this is a piece of cake, but for humans it is almost impossible.
However, if you hold your smartphone against someone who is singing the same song, the software will either say it cannot recognize it or make a random guess. Because there are only limited analyzed versions of music in the database, and there is no such randomly sung music, the software cannot find the corresponding "fingerprint." In this case, humans recognize the song immediately, and the song may even play on a loop in their head for days.
It can be said that the computer will be surprised to find that no matter whether the singer's pitch is high or low, the rhythm is fast or slow, out of tune or not, humans only need to listen to half of the song to identify the singer or song . For humans, part of the pleasure of listening to music comes from hearing the relationships between tones (including melody and harmony).
Scientists have long believed that songbirds have an absolute sense of music and can recognize and remember melodies based on pitch or fundamental frequency. More than 40 years ago, American ornithologist Stewart Hulse conducted a series of listening experiments on European starlings and came to this conclusion. He pointed out that starlings can distinguish sequences of pitches that gradually increase or decrease, but they cannot recognize sequences of pitches that vibrate slightly higher or lower. Hulls concluded that birds focused on absolute frequencies. Like most mammals, European starlings have absolute pitch rather than relative pitch.
When it comes to relative pitch perception, or the ability to identify transposed music, research on humans has been relatively in-depth. Neuroscientific research shows that using relative pitch abilities requires the invocation of a complex network of different neural mechanisms, including interactions between the auditory and parietal cortex. Songbirds do not appear to have such networks, so as we study the biological origins of human musicality, the question of whether other animals share relative pitch becomes even more fascinating as we study the biological origins of human musicality.
As far as we know, most animals have no sense of relative pitch. Humans seem to be the exception. But one might wonder whether relative pitch is related only to pitch. In the case of sound, perhaps in some respects it is not the absolute physical qualities but the relationships between qualities that create musicality.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego provide direction on how to answer this question. They let the starlings listen to different melodies that had their timbre and pitch manipulated. The stimulus condition was the so-called timbre melody – a sequence of tones with a different timbre for each tone. A series of acoustic experiments studied the patterns by which these birds classify novel melodies.
"Fish can tell the difference between works by John Lee Hooker and Johann Sebastian Bach."
Ling Surprisingly, the researchers found that the starlings did not use pitch to differentiate stimulus conditions as expected, but rather timbre and timbre changes (spectral contours). Birds will respond to a particular song, even if the song has been processed to remove all pitch information using a technique known as "noise coding." The resulting melody resembles a cacophony, a timbral melody in which one note morphs into another, but the pitch is imperceptible. Songbirds pay attention to pitch only when there is very little information (in Hulls's experiments with European starlings, the stimulus conditions consisted of pure tones without any spectral information).
Songbirds mainly rely on spectral information and its changes over time, or more precisely, changes in spectral energy when notes change, to perceive melody. Human beings focus on the tone and basically don’t pay attention to the timbre.
You could say that songbirds hear melodies the same way humans hear speech. When listening to speech, humans focus primarily on spectral information, which allows us to distinguish between the words "bath" and "bed." In music, melody and rhythm are the focus. When speaking, pitch is secondary—it can indicate the identity of the speaker or the emotional significance of the words—but when it comes to music, it becomes primary. This is an interesting difference between listening to music and listening to speech, but it is still difficult for people to understand.
The cerebral cortex is built for language, and is also stimulated by music. The sense of music may also be a by-product of the cerebral cortex. However, musicality may also take precedence over language and music. In this case, musicality can be interpreted as a sensitivity unique to humans and many non-human species, but in humans, this sensitivity has evolved into two overlapping cognitive systems: music and language.
At an international conference in Austria, the author stumbled across experimental evidence supporting this idea.
In a lecture, Michelle Spierings, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna, revealed differences in how zebra finches recognize sequences of sounds, which she calls syllables. learning process. These sounds are composed of human words such as "mo", "ca", and "pu". In a series of different behavioral experiments, the order (syntax), pitch, duration and dynamic range (spectral curve) of these speech sounds were varied.
The zebra finches first learned the difference between the Xyxy and xxyY sequences, where x and y represent different sounds, and the capital letters represent musical accents: that is, higher, longer, or louder accents. For example: "MO-ca-mo-ca" is different from "mo-mo-ca-CA".
The zebra finches then hear an unfamiliar sequence with varying stress and structure. The test was designed to determine whether birds use musical accent or phonetic sequence to distinguish differences.
As Mitchell showed, humans distinguish differences mainly based on the order of sounds: for example, abab is different from aabb, while cdcd is similar to abab. Humans generalize the abab structure and deduce it to unheard cdcd sequences. This suggests that when humans listen to a sequence, they are primarily concerned with syntax or phonetic order. Syntax (a word order, as in "man bites dog") is an important feature of language.
In contrast, zebra finches focus mainly on the musical qualities of sequences, but this does not mean that they are insensitive to word order (in fact, to some extent, they can Understanding word order), except that they differentiate sequences primarily by pitch (intonation), duration, and intensity stress (phonology).