Charles Darwin called music “among the most mysterious” faculties with which humans are endowed. Because he couldn’t decide what function music had, he suggested it might have served as the foundation for language—that perhaps “the rhythms and cadences of oratory are derived from previously developed musical powers.” But this was far from a settled question. In the 19th century, Darwin and English philosopher Herbert Spencer argued heatedly over which came first—music or language—and whether the capacity for music was unique to humans.
Hundreds of years later, these debates continue to rage. In a recent essay in the journal Current Biology, University of Amsterdam professor of music cognition Henkjan Honing argues that music is deeply rooted in human biology. This idea stands in direct opposition to arguments from American cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, who has written that music is a byproduct of human culture and that language came first. Research into the musical capacities of animals could help to inform the answer to this question, argues Honing. Over the past decade, scientists have begun to uncover specific differences between humans, apes, and birds when it comes to beat perception and other aspects of musicality, which could help us trace the thread of evolution back to its origins.
I spoke with Honing about how we can untangle biological and cultural influences on musicality, Ronan the California sea lion, who has great rhythm, people who are tone-deaf but can still detect emotion in music, and whether music can help restore the capacity for language when it’s been lost.
Are some people more musical than others?
Yes. But it’s never as simple as you have it or you don’t. It’s always slightly more or less. All traits have a distribution. This is true not just with musicality in general, but with the components of musicality, such as beat perception. This variation is very helpful for genetic studies. We’re especially interested in people at the extremes. Some people are inherently great at picking up rhythm, and some people can’t tell if a piece of music is a march or a waltz.
Of course, musicality is also a skill. Drummers are much better at keeping rhythm than people who have never touched a drum before. That’s actually a problem for genomics studies, because you have to separate the components of musicality from the acrobatics of playing an instrument or singing. To learn to play a violin, for instance, takes a very long time and requires certain kinds of dexterity that are unrelated to musicality.
That’s why I focus more on perception. When a person judges the quality of a sound, how it compares to another sound, which one they like more, they don’t need the body to express what they’re perceiving.
I’m assuming that even with perception, though, there’s some learning involved.
Correct. Whether you’re sensitive to the beat may start with your phenotype. But then it could also be colored by the culture you live in, so you have to test it in multiple cultures. And you have to test it early in life and later in life to determine what environmental influences are present, such as practice.
You see these influences even with animals. Ronan the California sea lion had a spotlight in the news a few years ago, because she could bob her head in time with the beat of “Boogie Wonderland” from Earth, Wind & Fire at the tender age of 3. They did the same study, in 2025, when she was 15, and found that she was much better at this task, having continued to practice over time. She could bob in perfect synchrony.
How about you? Are you a musical person?
When people use the word musical today, they’re mostly talking about making music. As a child and young adult, the only thing I did was make music. Science came later. I’m not playing the piano anymore. I get very frustrated because it’s not the quality that I like. I prefer to do it well, or not at all. But I like listening to music. I’m musical in the sense that I can really get emotional or touched, physically touched almost. I can fall off my chair. I’m really involved in listening.
I recently interviewed Giacomo Bignardi about his work on the genetics associated with this kind of falling-off-your-chair reaction to music and art, which he and others refer to as aesthetic chills. How do these kinds of intense emotional reactions to music fit into the larger picture of how musical someone is?
We know that music has a relationship to emotion. People who listen to it get consoled or they get excited. Chills are one phenomenon people report when they listen to a particular piece that they like, at a certain moment in the music. It happens almost every time at the same point in the same song. And that’s informative. The research also shows that people get a reward, a hit of the neurotransmitter dopamine, when they’re listening to music. That’s a very strong piece of evidence that music has a biological basis. Otherwise, why would the reward system get involved? That happens also with eating food and having sex. I think this idea originally came from the work of Robert Zatorre of McGill University. He wrote his beautiful book From Perception to Pleasure. He has now shown that this reward system is intricately involved in music listening in a way that has all kinds of applications for our field, but also for clinical therapies.
Read more: “What Makes Music Universal”
In the intro to your essay, you say that rather than treating music as a cultural artifact, current research targets what’s known as musicality. What is musicality?
Musicality is the perception, the production, and the appreciation of the thing that we call music. So we make a distinction between music, the thing that you hear; the object, the records that you play; and musicality, the capacity to recognize that music and get pleasure from it, including feeling chills. Understanding the mechanisms that enable and constrain your perception and appreciation of music: That’s the study of musicality.
What do we know at this point about where biology ends and culture begins when it comes to musicality?
The nature-nurture debate is resolved in the sense that we’re now more aware that they’re always interacting. But maybe the good metaphor for this musical-musicality distinction is that being musical is roughly about culture, and musicality is about biology. It’s a lot like food. All over the world, you have different recipes, different tastes, different ways of eating, but we all share hunger and taste. The hunger and the taste, that’s the musicality, the biological predispositions that make you eat and make you enjoy eating because you taste certain things, but not other things.
What should we make of someone like Nabokov, who is widely considered a master of literary arts, but claimed to dislike music?
I love this phenomenon. Some people get excited about music and spend their life making it or doing research about it, and other people dislike it. I also find people who don’t care. It’s an interesting group of people. I try to talk to these people. It’s very rare to find somebody who says they never play music. I met a librarian once, and she said, “I don’t have records at home. I never listen to music. It irritates me, the sound.” I find that interesting.
And then there are people known as musical anhedonics, who don’t get pleasure out of music. These people are studied by a research group at the University of Barcelona. And that’s very informative because you can look at what’s different about their brains, and find out more about which networks are involved in musical pleasure. I find it fascinating to also research people who are tone-deaf. They’re well studied. Some of these people can’t distinguish two melodies that are very different, but they still can pick up the emotions in the music. They can’t hear that music is out of tune, but they do hear that it’s optimistic or sad. So those musical sounds still have communicative power.
You argue that musicality might actually have come before speech in human evolution. This idea that music came first, you write, began with Charles Darwin. Why is it just gaining traction today, hundreds of years later? What happened in the interim?
The idea that there might have been a musical proto language preceding music and language in our current culture is indeed an old idea by Darwin. He proposed that language might make use of something that we likely share with all animals, a sensitivity to pitch patterns, to intonation, to rhythm, to dynamics in a musical way. But nobody tried to test it until more recently. It could be the other way around. The most provocative counter theory comes from Steven Pinker who said, “Language has a long evolutionary history. It evolved as an adaptation. It gave us an advantage as a species. And music is just the byproduct.” It could be like Steven Pinker says. The evidence is almost equal.
What would tip the scales? What experiments do you need to do to decide which one came first?
First, we have to determine which components of musicality or language are exclusive to speech or to music, not shared. Beat perception is one of those examples. Regular beats are essential to music, but you try to avoid them in language. If. You. Speak. Very. Regularly. In. Language. Like that, it sounds very odd. You don’t want that. Also repetition. If I say something, if I say something, if I say something after three times, you get irritated. But in music, we do that. You do that all the time. It’s always repetition. It’s nice. So the beat comes again and again and again. We like that. That makes beat perception an interesting one to test.
How do you account for how language has changed over time, though? I was just thinking of poetry, which is still with us, of course, but early on, it was perhaps a more common means of communicating stories. And it does have some of those musical elements: meter, repetition.
Yes, there’s always a bit of overlap. But there’s an important difference. And that’s where the turn taking comes from. Turn taking is typical for language. We alternate all the time when we talk together. Musicians don’t alternate. They all play at the same time. Beat perception is one of those mechanisms that allows you to know the tempo of the other drummer, or the other player. It’s about synchronization.
You note, in the essay, that a lot of progress has been made in our understanding of the evolution of music over the past two decades. What are the most important things that we’ve learned?
Cross-species research and cross-cultural research are the two fields that have contributed the most to our understanding of the evolution of musicality in that time. And then you have genetics, which is still the big promise. That’s where we’ll see the real revolution. We’ve got large groups of people figuring that one out.
Cross-cultural research is very informative in that it shows, against the intuitions of most musicologists, that there are more similarities than differences if you statistically sample all the music in the world. That’s been now repetitively shown by Patrick Savage and Samuel Mehr and others in papers in Nature and Science, suggesting similar biological constraints.
For example, the scales that different world musical traditions use are almost universally divided into roughly five to seven tones of an equal size. That happens everywhere. And that’s weird. Apparently, our cognition makes those melodies more memorable, reproducible. or learnable. The next step is to ask, what biology is contributing to that?
The cross-species research over the last 10 years has dug into what shared musical talents closely related species have in common. If they both have a particular talent, then we can reason that their common ancestor probably did as well. You can also find distantly related species, like a human versus a bird, and see what they share. Then you have two data points, and you can start asking, under which conditions of selective pressure did a certain skill come up, and what was it used for?
Of course, there are many, many animals, and we’re only starting now with humans versus apes and humans versus birds. Those are the two main animal models that we compare in the musicality research. Macaques, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gibbons, for instance. But there are many other animals to study so there will be more surprises in the near future.
Is there one question you most want to answer next in this research?
Yes. I’m organizing a meeting in a month with Robert Zatorre, Tecumseh Fitch, and other heroes of my field. The topic there will be spectral precepts, which is a technical term, but it essentially means timbre, or sound color. We know a lot about rhythm and melody, but very little about timbre. When musicians or researchers are listening to music or to a bird, and we want to track what we’re hearing, we usually note the rhythm and the melody, but not the timbre.
For animals, timbre is important. Timbre is a more important factor than melody in deciding which bird is singing. Timbre is also how humans hear speech. But weirdly enough, when we listen to music, we forget about sound color a bit. We don’t mind if the same song is played on a flute or a trumpet, it’s still the same song. I find that fascinating. How does that work?
You mention that a better understanding of musicality could be used for clinical interventions for language disorders, motor impairments, and mood disorders. Can you tell me more about the healing potential of music?
The interesting byproduct of this research is that we now have more evidence that music and speech are processed in largely separate networks or different pathways in the brain. Robert Zatorre and colleagues conducted a very beautiful study a few years ago that showed that different parts of the brain are involved in the perception of melody versus lyrics. We also know that some people who have lost their capacity for language, or who have dementia, can remember music from their youth.Music and health is a growing clinical field. A lot of people get grants to work on that now. It’s not just therapy in the sense that it’s entertaining or relaxing, but also because it’s so intertwined with our biology. And then you have this whole field called music as medicine, which is the most extreme version of that. Music can generate dopamine. It can generate endorphins and suppress pain. You have to use the right kind of music, of course, as it’s often very individual.
But music might even, in some cases, repair things that are broken. The evidence for this isn’t solid yet, but at Harvard Medical School, they were using musical interventions to help people who have aphasia, who can’t talk, to start talking again. The same was true for people who were stuttering. If this research holds up, we may find that music has the capacity to restore a person’s control of language. Critics talk about confounds—that the improvements really have to do with attention and other things. But I’m less skeptical than I used to be. 
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