Speaker
Description
Who’s got rhythm? Why are we such musical, chatty animals? Human music and speech, almost anomalies for evolutionary biology, both feature rhythm among their building blocks. Many hypotheses try to explain the origins of rhythm capacities, but few are empirically tested and compared. Because music and speech do not fossilize, the comparative approach provides a powerful tool to tap into human cognitive history. Human-like rhythm behaviors may be found across a few species. Hence, investigating rhythm across species is not only interesting to zoology, but it is key to unveil when music-like behaviors appeared in human evolution. Here, I introduce the major hypotheses for the evolution of vocal rhythmicity, which link acoustic rhythms to vocal learning, gait, breathing, or group chorusing. I suggest how integrating approaches from ethology, psychology, neuroscience, modeling, and physiology is needed. I zoom in on some crucial species which are key to test alternative hypotheses on rhythm origins. Rhythm data from marine mammals and primates suggests that comparative research can benefit from ecologically-relevant setups, combining strengths from human cognitive neuroscience and behavioral ecology. Finally, I present human experiments where musical rhythm is created and evolves culturally due to cognitive and motoric biases. Both behavioral and neural data show an interplay between biology and culture. These results suggest that, while the full package may be uniquely human, many mammals share one or more building blocks of human rhythmicity. These biological biases may be amplified by cultural transmission to result in human musical rhythm as we know it.
| If you're submitting a symposium talk, what's the symposium title? | The Beat and Beyond: Unveiling the Roots, Development, and Applications of Human Musical Rhythm |
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| If you're submitting a symposium, or a talk that is part of a symposium, is this a junior symposium? | No |
