Interdisciplinary perspectives on the capacity to perceive, appreciate, and make music. Research shows that all humans have a predisposition for music, just as they do for language. All of us can perceive and enjoy music, even if we can't carry a tune and consider ourselves "unmusical." This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the capacity to perceive, appreciate, and make music. Scholars from biology, musicology, neurology, genetics, computer science, anthropology, psychology, and other fields consider what music is for and why every human culture has it
whether musicality is a uniquely human capacity
and what biological and cognitive mechanisms underlie it. Contributors outline a research program in musicality, and discuss issues in studying the evolution of music
consider principles, constraints, and theories of origins
review musicality from cross-cultural, cross-species, and cross-domain perspectives
discuss the computational modeling of animal song and creativity
and offer a historical context for the study of musicality. The volume aims to identify the basic neurocognitive mechanisms that constitute musicality (and effective ways to study these in human and nonhuman animals) and to develop a method for analyzing musical phenotypes that point to the biological basis of musicality.