Nvincing [51,52]. An elitist attitude can thus lead us to overlook aspects of musicality that are purchase Y-27632 centrally relevant biologically. Equally important are the cognitive abilities of self-avowed `non-musicians’. One of the most fundamental findings in the last two decades of music cognition research is that untrained listeners, including those who claim they know nothing about music, exhibit sophisticated perceptual and cognitive abilities implying rich implicit understanding of musical principles (cf. [53?5]). In many cases such capabilities are already present in infants and children as well [12,13,56]. Any scientific exploration of the biological basis of human musicality should therefore take a broad view of musicality, across ages and over multiple levels of skill or training. This is not to say that musical expertise should be ignored as an explanatory factor: contrasts between highly skilled musicians and untrained listeners can provide a valuable source of data to help address mechanistic and developmental questions. But a focus only on the musical elite may often prove fundamentally misleading. A third important facet of this principle concerns the diverse functions of music in human societies, with different functions shaping the expression of musicality in fundamental ways. For example, music created for dancers will typically have a clear and steady rhythm, as will most music intended for simultaneous performance by multiple individuals [35]. In both cases, a steady and explicit rhythmic framework is a crucial asset in group synchronization. By contrast, music for solo performance that is intended to express sorrow will develop under very different constraints, and may show no clear isochronic beat at all [57?9]. Only by studying the multiple contexts in which human musicality is expressed can we begin to make meaningful generalizations about the overall function(s) of music (cf. [22]). Principle four thus states that, in order to obtain an ecologically valid overview of human musicality, we need to take a broad, populist and non-elitist viewpoint about what `counts’ as music. While high art music of many cultures is certainly relevant in this endeavour (including Western orchestral symphonies, Ghanaian agbekor improvisations, North Indian ragas or Balinese gamelan), so are folk music, nursery tunes, working chants and even whistling while you work or singing in the shower. Dance music in particular should be embraced as one of the core universal behavioural contexts for human music, and dance itself accepted as a component of human musicality.at answering this question might combine the comparative and ecological principles to ask what functions music performs in human societies, and to what extent we can identify mechanisms underlying those functions in non-human purchase RP5264 animals. This approach leads us to recognize at least four subcomponents of music, as described below.rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org(a) Song: complex, learned vocalizationsLet us start with song, one of the few aspects of human musicality that virtually all commentators agree is universally found in all human cultures [2,60?2]. Perhaps the most obvious fact about human song is that it varies considerably between cultures, and much less so within cultures (e.g. [3]). That is, each culture has both a shared, open-ended repertoire of specific songs, and culturally specific styles or idioms that encompass multiple songs. This situation is only possible when songs can be.Nvincing [51,52]. An elitist attitude can thus lead us to overlook aspects of musicality that are centrally relevant biologically. Equally important are the cognitive abilities of self-avowed `non-musicians’. One of the most fundamental findings in the last two decades of music cognition research is that untrained listeners, including those who claim they know nothing about music, exhibit sophisticated perceptual and cognitive abilities implying rich implicit understanding of musical principles (cf. [53?5]). In many cases such capabilities are already present in infants and children as well [12,13,56]. Any scientific exploration of the biological basis of human musicality should therefore take a broad view of musicality, across ages and over multiple levels of skill or training. This is not to say that musical expertise should be ignored as an explanatory factor: contrasts between highly skilled musicians and untrained listeners can provide a valuable source of data to help address mechanistic and developmental questions. But a focus only on the musical elite may often prove fundamentally misleading. A third important facet of this principle concerns the diverse functions of music in human societies, with different functions shaping the expression of musicality in fundamental ways. For example, music created for dancers will typically have a clear and steady rhythm, as will most music intended for simultaneous performance by multiple individuals [35]. In both cases, a steady and explicit rhythmic framework is a crucial asset in group synchronization. By contrast, music for solo performance that is intended to express sorrow will develop under very different constraints, and may show no clear isochronic beat at all [57?9]. Only by studying the multiple contexts in which human musicality is expressed can we begin to make meaningful generalizations about the overall function(s) of music (cf. [22]). Principle four thus states that, in order to obtain an ecologically valid overview of human musicality, we need to take a broad, populist and non-elitist viewpoint about what `counts’ as music. While high art music of many cultures is certainly relevant in this endeavour (including Western orchestral symphonies, Ghanaian agbekor improvisations, North Indian ragas or Balinese gamelan), so are folk music, nursery tunes, working chants and even whistling while you work or singing in the shower. Dance music in particular should be embraced as one of the core universal behavioural contexts for human music, and dance itself accepted as a component of human musicality.at answering this question might combine the comparative and ecological principles to ask what functions music performs in human societies, and to what extent we can identify mechanisms underlying those functions in non-human animals. This approach leads us to recognize at least four subcomponents of music, as described below.rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org(a) Song: complex, learned vocalizationsLet us start with song, one of the few aspects of human musicality that virtually all commentators agree is universally found in all human cultures [2,60?2]. Perhaps the most obvious fact about human song is that it varies considerably between cultures, and much less so within cultures (e.g. [3]). That is, each culture has both a shared, open-ended repertoire of specific songs, and culturally specific styles or idioms that encompass multiple songs. This situation is only possible when songs can be.
