ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2015
Without it no music: cognition, biology and evolution of musicality.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 93 papers.
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Who cites it
93 citing papers in PubMed.
- Critical Review on the Development and Evolution of Beat Perception.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Review
- Female Budgerigars Attend Equally to Rhythmic Beat or Repetition, While Humans Prioritize Their Combination.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Humans, but not zebra finches, produce spontaneously isochronous song through the lifespan.iScience · 2026Article
- Rhythmic Structure Shapes Dyadic Self-Other Representations Through Interpersonal Action Coupling.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Development of auditory and spontaneous movement responses to music over the first postnatal year.eLife · 2026Article
- Decoding the evolution of melodic and harmonic structure of Western music through the lens of network science.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The Emergence of a Universal Rhythmic Feature: Simple Models Can Produce Categorical Rhythms.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Human newborns form musical predictions based on rhythmic but not melodic structure.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Rooks (Corvus frugilegus) can show spontaneous vocal flexibility when exposed to dynamically changing rhythmic sounds.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Affective priming through Indian ragas: influence on perception of ambiguous visual stimuli and creativity.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Temporal relationship between dancer's body movements and music beats in classical ballet.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Musical Expertise Reshapes Cross-Domain Semantic Integration: ERP Evidence from Language and Music Processing.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Twin modelling reveals partly distinct genetic pathways to music enjoyment.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Beyond the music itself: How the social bond of listeners with performers affects their music liking.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Rhythmic Roots: The Adaptive Functions of Vocal Isochrony and Its Role in Human Music and Language Evolution.Psihologijske teme = Psychological themes = Psychological topics · 2025Article
- Frontoparietal network topology as a neural marker of musical perceptual abilities.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
- Isochronous singing in 3 crested gibbon species (Current zoology · 2024Article
- Music and Emotions in Non-Human Animals from Biological and Comparative Perspectives.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Review
33 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Musicality can be defined as a natural, spontaneously developing trait based on and constrained by biology and cognition. Music, by contrast, can be defined as a social and cultural construct based on that very musicality. One critical challenge is to delineate the constituent elements of musicality. What biological and cognitive mechanisms are essential for perceiving, appreciating and making music? Progress in understanding the evolution of music cognition depends upon adequate characterization of the constituent mechanisms of musicality and the extent to which they are present in non-human species. We argue for the importance of identifying these mechanisms and delineating their functions and developmental course, as well as suggesting effective means of studying them in human and non-human animals. It is virtually impossible to underpin the evolutionary role of musicality as a whole, but a multicomponent perspective on musicality that emphasizes its constituent capacities, development and neural cognitive specificity is an excellent starting point for a research programme aimed at illuminating the origins and evolution of musical behaviour as an autonomous trait.
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