This week, the Hedgehog and the Fox investigate the origins of human musicality by looking for musical ability and perception in other animals, including rhesus macaques, zebra finches, a cockatoo named Snowball, and Ronan, a headbanging California sea lion. Our guide to this Evolving Animal Orchestra, as his book title puts it, is Henkjan Honing, professor of music cognition at the University of Amsterdam.
Henkjan Honing, ©2 012 Eduard Lampe
Henkjan takes as his starting point a conjecture of Charles Darwin’s from The Descent of Man, published in 1871:
‘The perception, if not the enjoyment, of musical cadences and of rhythm is probably common to all animals and no doubt depends on the common physiological nature of their nervous systems.’
Henkjan’s book is not about the origins of music, but the structure of musicality, that collection of attributes that enable us to make and appreciate music, such as perception of a regular beat or the ability to imitate a melody. If such traits are based on our cognitive abilities and biological predispositions, it makes sense to look for them in other animals. All sorts of fascinating hypotheses then open up: if musicality is a sensitivity that humans share with many non-human species, it may have preceded the development of music and of language, but enabled both. Music would then not be a mere by-product, something delicious but ultimately useless, ‘auditory cheesecake’, as evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker posited, but foundational.
Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
Henkjan has been interested in musicality in animals for about a decade. But back in the 1980s, when he started his academic career, his focus was on computers, specifically applying AI techniques to the formalization of musical knowledge. This included a spell at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford. I began our conversation by asking him about the transition from computers to animals.