The Ash Twins Blog

Nice article on human auditory capabilities and music perception by Trehub and Hannon (2006):

Here’s the abstract:

We review the literature on infants’ perception of pitch and temporal patterns, relating it to comparable research with human adult and non-human listeners. Although there are parallels in relative pitch processing across age and species, there are notable differences. Infants accomplish such tasks with ease, but non-human listeners require extensive training to achieve very modest levels of performance. In general, human listeners process auditory sequences in a holistic manner, and non-human listeners focus on absolute aspects of individual tones. Temporal grouping processes and categorization on the basis of rhythm are evident in non-human listeners and in human infants and adults. Although synchronization to sound patterns is thought to be uniquely human, tapping to music, synchronous firefly flashing, and other cyclic behaviors can be described by similar mathematical principles. We conclude that infants’ music perception skills are a product of general perceptual mechanisms that are neither music nor species-specific. Along with general-purpose mechanisms for the perceptual foundations of music, we suggest unique motivational mechanisms that can account for the perpetuation of musical behavior in all human societies.

And some excerpts:

Adults are biased to group successive events according to their similarity in spectral structure (timbre), pitch, intensity, temporal proximity, or spatial location. For example, they segment a repeating, ambiguous pattern into groups of similar elements, reporting XXXOO or OOXXX, which begin and end with multiple instances of the same element (X or O) but rarely reporting OXXOO, which cuts across multiple identical elements (O) (Royer & Garner, 1966)…

French newborns distinguish speech samples from different rhythmic classes, such as English and Japanese, but not those within the same rhythmic class, such as English and Dutch (Nazzi, Bertoncini, & Mehler, 1998)…

Measures of durational contrast in English and French are associated with culture- specific rhythms in music from England and France, which implies that rhythmic structures in speech influence, or are influenced by, rhythmic structures in music (Patel & Daniele, 2003)…

[P]igeons categorize temporal intervals on the basis of relative duration (longer or shorter) (Zentall, Weaver, & Clement, 2004), and starlings (Hulse, Humpal, & Cynx, 1984a) as well as bottle-nosed dolphins (Harley et al., 2003) discriminate contrasting rhythms composed of identical intervals. After starlings learn to respond differentially to rhythmic versus arrhythmic patterns, they show generalization to patterns with altered tempo and tone frequency (Hulse, Humpal, & Cynx, 1984b). Dolphins also discriminate rhythms despite transformations of pitch level and tempo (Harley et al., 2003). These findings imply that rhythmic patterns are salient for non-human as well as human listeners…

When adults are asked to tap to music, they show a high degree of inter-subject agreement, tapping at metrically strong beats in the music (Drake, Penel, & Bigand, 2000; Snyder & Krumhansl, 2001)… [T]he tendency to perceive meter is so strong that most listeners perceive a ‘‘tick-tock’’ or strong–weak pattern in isochronous patterns of uniform tones (Brochard, Abecasis, Potter, Ragot, & Drake, 2003)…

Synchronized movement to music has been observed in all known cultures, which implies that this skill is universal and perhaps unique to human musical behavior (Brown, 2003)… There are no known examples of non-human animals synchronizing their behavior to music, which makes it tempting to suggest that musical meter is species-specific. The closest non-human parallel to musical meter is the synchronous flashing of fireflies. Some firefly species synchronize their flashing with that of other fireflies and with flashing artificial lights, typically in the context of courtship (Buck, 1988). Interestingly, some species synchronize at multiples of an exogenous stimulus, an ability that is characteristic of human responses to musical meter (Buck, 1988). Different mechanisms may underlie firefly flashing and human dancing, but similar mathematical principles can describe and predict synchronization in firefly flashing, human tapping, sleep–wake cycles, menstrual cycles, and many other processes, which implies that synchronization is common or even inevitable (Glass, 2001; Large & Kolen, 1994; Strogatz, 2003). Perhaps human listeners’ perception of meter arises from a simple, widespread mechanism of synchronization rather than from unique, music-specific abilities.