Neuroscience research has exploded, with more than fifty thousand neuroscientists applying
increasingly advanced methods. A mountain of new facts and mechanisms has emerged …

Hierarchical structure with nested nonlocal dependencies is a key feature of human
language and can be identified theoretically in most pieces of tonal music. However …

There have been many attempts to discuss the evolutionary origins of music. We review
theories of music origins and take the perspective that music is originally derived from …

Both music and language are found in all known human societies, yet no studies have
compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music on a …

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the processing of pitch combinations. It
examines the ways in which pitch combinations are abstracted by the perceptual system …

Speech is a distinctive feature of our species. It is the default channel for language and
constitutes our primary mode of social communication. Determining the evolutionary origins …

Musical chords are combinations of two or more tones played together. While many different
chords are used in music, some are heard as more attractive (consonant) than others. We …

In this chapter we outline areas of musical processing that may be universal to humans.
Music here refers to temporally structured human activities, social and individual, in the …

This study investigates F 0 declination in broadcast news speech in English and Mandarin
Chinese. The results demonstrate a strong relationship between utterance length and …

The ability to discriminate pitch changes (or intervals) is foundational for speech and music.
In an auditory psychophysical experiment, musicians and non-musicians were tested with …