Unravelling our capacity for music: The contour hypothesis

This proposal is about ‘musicality’. It aims to identify which set of music cognitive traits gives rise to our ability to perceive and appreciate music. We will approach musicality as a multicomponent phenomenon, aiming to decompose the capacity for music into its constituent components. The focus will be on melody and rhythm cognition, with special attention to their interaction with timbre. We hypothesize that everyday listeners are attentive to the relative aspects in all dimensions of the musical signal, suggesting ‘contour perception’ (a sensitivity to the relations between successive sounds, rather than their absolute values) to be widespread and fundamental to music cognition. In a series of listening experiments, we will test this ‘contour hypothesis’ by disentangling the contributions of melodic, rhythmic and timbral contours to the recognition of familiar music. Next to lab-based and field-based listening experiments, we will develop engaging online games (i.e. citizen science) to be able to probe musicality phenotypes on an unprecedented scale (aiming at 1M+ participants from different societies). This will allow us to properly characterize musicality and reveal its phenotypical variation between individuals and across societies. The latter allows us to differentiate between cognitive, biological and environmental aspects of musicality. The research will result in a ‘phenomics of musicality’, providing a robust and relatively unbiased way of identifying the human capacity for music. Overall, the project serves as an important first step in a larger research pro-gramme, that has the aspiration to lay a new, interdisciplinary foundation for the study of musicality.