![]() Tonal hierarchical organization of pitch is central because it facilitates perception, memory, and performance by creating expectancies 13, 14. The organizational principle of tonality is largely absent in speech 9, 10, yet the presence of discrete pitches, often forming nonequidistant scales, is ‘statistically universal’ across musical systems 11, even as scales differ across societies 12. These tonal principles allow, for example, any individual to detect an out-of-scale note in the musical surface. Nonscale tones are the least stable and often sound “sour”. Among the other scale tones, there is a hierarchy of importance or stability 8. In such music, scale tones are organized around a central tone, sometimes called the tonic, which usually starts and ends a musical piece. Most tonal music uses 4–7 focal pitches, forming a scale. Here, we examine whether sung improvisations demonstrate what has been proposed as one of the fundamental components of musicality: tonal organization of pitch 6, 7. Musicality can be defined as, “a natural, spontaneously developing set of traits based on and constrained by our cognitive abilities and their underlying biology” 5. The findings are a proof of concept that improvisation can serve as a novel, even enjoyable method for systematically measuring hidden aspects of musicality across the spectrum of musical ability. The results show signatures of tonality in both nonmusicians and individuals with congenital amusia, who have notorious difficulty performing musical tasks that require explicit responses and memory. To assess the extent to which each improvisation reflects tonality, which has been proposed to be a core organizational principle of musicality and which is present within most music traditions, we developed a new algorithm that compares a sung excerpt to a probability density function representing the tonal hierarchy of Western music. Each sang 28 long improvisations as a response to a verbal prompt or a continuation of a melodic stem. Here, we exploit this natural inclination to probe implicit musical knowledge in 33 untrained and poor singers (amusia). More information about SG&USE can be found here.Humans spontaneously invent songs from an early age. Please make sure your registration is done properly, otherwise we will not be able to verify that you were present. You will need to have your student ID number on hand because you'll need it to fill out the form. Before the program starts, we will explain where and when you can find the link to the registration form. You can only register for SG&USE if you watch the entire program live via MS Teams and are logged in with your personal TU/e student email account (i.e., you can’t watch it at a later time and can’t watch via other accounts) and if you complete an online SG&USE registration form within five minutes after the end of the program. Please register your participation on the spot when attending the program on campus, by scanning your student card after the lecture at the venue. Please do not book a ticket if you want to watch the livestream. Students who want to register for SG& USE should log in with their TU/e student email account and watch the entire program. You can attend by clicking on this LINK TO LIVESTREAM. This program will also be streamed live via MS Teams. In addition to a research agenda ( The Origins of Musicality, 2018, MIT Press), Honing has published several books for the general public, including the English-language publications Music Cognition: The Basics and The Evolving Animal Orchestra.Īttending the lecture on campus (Blauwe Zaal) will only be possible for TU/e students. His aim is to define the cognitive and biological mechanisms that underpin musicality. He studies what musicality is, or can be, and to what extent human beings share musicality with other animals. ![]() ![]() Henkjan Honing is a professor of Music Cognition at both the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Science of the University of Amsterdam and founder of the Music Cognition Group. We are a musical species, but are we the only musical species? Is our musical predisposition unique, like our linguistic ability? Henkjan Honing shows in a lively, interactive presentation full of music samples that scientists are getting closer and closer to discovering the biological and evolutionary source of our musicality. Research shows that all humans possess the trait of musicality. Even those of us who can't play a musical instrument or lack a sense of rhythm can perceive and enjoy music. ![]()
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