Project description
Listening closely to the musicality across species
Scientific research into the origins of human musicality has been a complex task. While other creatures have been found to have songs that they use to produce vocalisations, the focus of this research has been on birds. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the MAS project fills a knowledge gap concerning the origins of music. It explores musical structure in the songs of humpback whales and gibbons, which are distantly related mammals with highly structured vocalisations. Using machine learning techniques, the project examines pitch structure and expressiveness, comparing their songs with human music to better understand how musicality may have evolved across species.
Objective
Musicality can be defined as the biological and cognitive abilities necessary to appreciate and create music, which makes song production a significant marker of the trait in the human species. In analogy, some acoustic behaviours of other species, whether birds, whales or primates, have also been traditionally termed songs. However, to date the relatively few studies of parallels between human and animal songs have focused mainly on bird songs. Broader cross-species comparison of animal songs would contribute to addressing the evolutionary origins of music, by disentangling the role of phylogeny and behavioural traits hypothesised to underlie musicality in humans.
Two exemplary mammalian singers are humpback whales and gibbons. Their tonal and patterned vocal sequences are traditionally termed songs, but features of musicality have not yet been rigorously assessed. Such an observation would provide critical insights, as these two species possess proposed fundamental traits of musicality (they both have harmonically rich vocalisations, humpback whales are vocal learners and gibbons sing in duets), and they lie at very distinct branches of the mammalian phylogenetic tree. This research will thus test the existence of musical features in humpback whale and gibbon songs.
Tests for the presence of overtone-based pitch selection (i.e. frequency intervals corresponding to small-integer proportions drawn from the harmonic series) and expressiveness (i.e. the oscillation between repetition and variation found in human music) have been successful in bird songs. Systematic measurements for these two features will be conducted in passive acoustic recordings of wild singing humpback whales and gibbons, for their songs to be compared with human music. This search will benefit from machine learning based vocalisation detection, classification and similarity measurements, as well as sub-unit segmentation, allowing a systematic analysis of musicality, robust against both signals
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences zoology mammalogy primatology
- natural sciences biological sciences biological morphology comparative morphology
- natural sciences biological sciences zoology mammalogy cetology
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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1010 Wien
Austria
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