On the biological basis of musicality

In recent years, music and musicality have seen an increasing amount of research effort. This has led to a growing role and visibility of the contribution of (bio)musicology to the field of neuroscience and cognitive sciences at large. While it has been widely acknowledged that there are commonalities between speech, language and musicality, several researchers explain this by considering musicality as being an epiphenomenon of language. However, an alternative hypothesis is that musicality is an innate and widely shared capacity for music, that can be seen as a natural, spontaneously developing set of traits based on and constrained by our cognitive abilities and their underlying biology. The symposium “On the biological basis of musicality” brought together leading experts on the comparative study of musicality in humans and several well-known animal models (monkeys, birds, pinnipeds). Such a comparison will further our insights on which features of musicality are exclusive to humans and which are shared between humans and non-human animals, contribute to an understanding of the musical phenotype, as well as further constrain existing evolutionary theories of music and musicality.