Musicality in human vocal communication: an evolutionary perspective

JD Leongómez, J Havlíček… - … Transactions of the …, 2022 - royalsocietypublishing.org
Studies show that specific vocal modulations, akin to those of infant-directed speech (IDS)
and perhaps music, play a role in communicating intentions and mental states during human …

Origins of music in credible signaling

SA Mehr, MM Krasnow, GA Bryant… - Behavioral and Brain …, 2021 - cambridge.org
Music comprises a diverse category of cognitive phenomena that likely represent both the
effects of psychological adaptations that are specific to music (eg, rhythmic entrainment) and …

Statistical universals reveal the structures and functions of human music

PE Savage, S Brown, E Sakai… - Proceedings of the …, 2015 - National Acad Sciences
Music has been called “the universal language of mankind.” Although contemporary
theories of music evolution often invoke various musical universals, the existence of such …

Principles of structure building in music, language and animal song

M Rohrmeier, W Zuidema… - … transactions of the …, 2015 - royalsocietypublishing.org
Human language, music and a variety of animal vocalizations constitute ways of sonic
communication that exhibit remarkable structural complexity. While the complexities of …

Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries

N Jacoby, R Polak, JA Grahn, DJ Cameron… - Nature Human …, 2024 - nature.com
Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is
universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm …

Large-scale iterated singing experiments reveal oral transmission mechanisms underlying music evolution

M Anglada-Tort, PMC Harrison, H Lee, N Jacoby - Current Biology, 2023 - cell.com
Speech and song have been transmitted orally for countless human generations, changing
over time under the influence of biological, cognitive, and cultural pressures. Cross-cultural …

The evolutionary biology of musical rhythm: was Darwin wrong?

AD Patel - PLoS biology, 2014 - journals.plos.org
In The Descent of Man, Darwin speculated that our capacity for musical rhythm reflects basic
aspects of brain function broadly shared among animals. Although this remains an …

Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech: A Registered Report

Y Ozaki, A Tierney, PQ Pfordresher, JM McBride… - Science …, 2024 - science.org
Both music and language are found in all known human societies, yet no studies have
compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music on a …

Sequence alignment of folk song melodies reveals cross-cultural regularities of musical evolution

PE Savage, S Passmore, G Chiba, TE Currie, H Suzuki… - Current Biology, 2022 - cell.com
Summary Culture evolves, 1–5 but the existence of cross-culturally general regularities of
cultural evolution is debated. 6–8 As a diverse but universal cultural phenomenon, music …

[HTML][HTML] Final lengthening and vowel length in 25 languages

L Paschen, S Fuchs, F Seifart - Journal of Phonetics, 2022 - Elsevier
Lengthening of segments at the end of prosodic domains is commonly considered a
universal phenomenon, but language-specific variation has also been reported, specifically …