Music has been called "the universal language of mankind." Although contemporary theories of music evolution often invoke various musical universals, the existence of such universals has been disputed for decades and has never been empirically demonstrated. Here we combine a music-classification scheme with statistical analyses, including phylogenetic comparative methods, to examine a well-samp...

Is the human tendency toward musicality better thought of as the product of a specific, evolved instinct or an acquired skill? Developmental and evolutionary arguments are considered, along with issues of domain-specificity. The article also considers the question of why humans might be consistently and intensely drawn to music if musicality is not in fact the product of a specifically evolved ...

It has been suggested that individuals with synaesthesia may show heightened creativity as a result of being able to form meaningful associations between disparate stimuli (e.g. colour, sound). In this study, a large sample (N=82) of people with various kinds of synaesthesia were given two psychometric tests of creativity (Remote Associates Test, Alternate Uses Test) and were also asked about t...

Music streaming companies collectively serve billions of songs per day. Radio-based music services may intersperse audio advertisements among the songs as a means to generate revenue, much like traditional FM radio. Regardless of the monetization approach, the recommender system should decide when to play content that the listener is known to enjoy (exploit) and content that is novel to the lis...

Groove is often described as the experience of music that makes people tap their feet and want to dance. A high degree of consistency in ratings of groove across listeners indicates that physical properties of the sound signal contribute to groove (Madison, 2006). Here, correlations were assessed between listeners' ratings and a number of quantitative descriptors of rhythmic properties for one ...

One universal of human music perception is the tendency to move in synchrony with a periodic beat (e.g., in dance). This response is not commonly observed in nonhuman animals, raising the possibility that this behavior relies on brain circuits shaped by natural selection for music. Consequently, if a nonhuman animal can acquire this ability, this would inform debates over the evolutionary statu...

This manuscript was abstracted from a lecture for grand rounds for medical physicians. This paper explores the science of how music can help induce sleep relieves anxiety, and pain in patients. This method has been practiced from decades as a way to treat neurological conditions. Now, advances in neuroscience and brain imaging are revealing what is actually happening in the brain as patients li...