This week a video of an event that was moderated by Faith Salie and features author Jonathan Rosen; neurobiologist Erich Jarvis; scientist and noted bird researcher Irene Pepperberg; professor of comparative cognition at Cambridge University, Nicola Clayton; Head of the Laboratory of Animal Behavior at CUNY, Ofer Tchernichovski; and David Rothenberg, professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
This event took place on June 13, 2009 in the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University. This is the first of eleven segments (See YouTube).
Crying of newborn babies: A sign of inborn musical skill?
Even the crying of newborn babies seems to be more musical than we think. This can be concluded from an interesting study that was published last month in Current Biology. German researchers were able to show that newborns don’t just cry randomly, but - when studying the audio signal of their crying - one can distinguish between French and German babies. The German babies - only three days old - cry in a downward fashion, their French contemporaries showed an increasing swelling of the cry and stop abruptly.
Sound example: German & French baby cries.
How can we explain these differences? Babies do hear about three months before they are born. And the few prenatal studies that are available show that babies, in that stage of their development, already perceive and remember sounds. For instance, they recognize the sound of their mothers voice just after birth, and they can distinguish between tunes that they heard during pregnancy from those that they have never been exposed to before.
The correlation between the mother language of the babies and their average crying pattern, suggests that exposure to the language spoken by their caregivers (mother, father, etc.) influences the crying, since French language, on average, consists of raising melodies, and German intonation often shows a decreasing shape. The researchers suggest that this as a sign of a sensitivity to language from very early on in life.
My interpretation would be different. I would not so much relate these results to language, as well as a sign of a high sensitivity to the musical aspects of speech: rhythm, melody, stress (i.e. prosody). As quite some studies have shown (e.g., authors like Fernald, Trehub, Trainor, and others), infants and young children are extremely sensitive to these 'musical' variations in their environment. For example, infants seem to be highly sensitive for the musical and emotional aspects of infant-directed speech (IDS), more so than the actual linguistic structure, let alone semantics. I would therefore claim the results of the baby-study are actual evidence for very early signs of musical sensitivity to intonation and other musical aspects of sound, than that it should be seen as evidence for the start of learning a language.
P.S. I describe this argument in length in my new book Iedereen is muzikaal (Only available in Dutch).
Mampe, B., Friederici, A., Christophe, A., & Wermke, K. (2009). Newborns' Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.09.064
" [..] The covers of these two books, each of which in its own way deals with 'music and the brain', are basically the same (notwithstanding the fact that the one is a portrait of Oliver Sacks, and the other not-a-portrait of Henkjan Honing :-) Both prominently show a listener enjoying music played back through a set of headphones. Both listeners have put their right hand upon the very spot where the sounds originate. This is a common gesture, often made in an attempt to shield off possible 'alien' sounds coming in from the 'outside' and get even more 'inside' the music. And both listeners wear a very private smile: their eyes are closed, thus telling us that whatever is going on, it is going on inside their heads. The pictures show their retreat from all that is space, and thus quite forcefully underline that musical hearing (contrary to the hearing of a mere succession of acoustical events, that I like to call factual) is "the manifestation of time eventuating" (as Viktor Zuckerkandl nicely put it in his 1956 Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World.) [..]" HarS Soundblog (2010)
A recording of a lecture by dr Ani Patel from the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego, including an exposé on why beat induction (and/or synchronizing to a beat) might be special to 'musical animals':
Patel, A., Iversen, J., Bregman, M., & Schulz, I. (2009). Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038
Today - as start of the new year - a link to a review by Harold Schellinx of Iedereen is muzikaal, to give you a flavour of the book.
N.B. Schellinx was a fellow student from the then Utrecht based Institute of Sonology and is now an independent media-artist and -theorist, living and working in Paris, Amsterdam and elsewhere.
Nur eine Minderheit für Schönberg, Stockhausen und Cage? [German]
"Neue Musik ist anstrengend. Neuro- und Musikwissenschaftler erforschen, warum die Klänge von Schönberg, Stockhausen und Cage nur eine Minderheit begeistern."
Does natural selection play a role in cultural change?
Natural selection expresses the idea that organisms (i.e. their genes) vary and that variability has consequences. Some variants are unfit and go extinct, others adapt and do well. This process, repeated over millions of years, has given us the variety of life on earth.
Many authors have played with the idea how to combine these insights from evolutionary biology to changes in culture, the notion of ‘memes’ being one of them. Richard Dawkins proposed that human culture is composed of a multitude of particulate units, memes, which are analogous to the genes of biological transmission. These cultural replicators are transmitted by imitation between members of a community and are subject to mutational-evolutionary pressures over time.
Recently researchers at Imperial College London started yet another attempt to try to show if, and how, natural selection might play a role in music. They are currently running an online experiment hoping to find support for this idea:
