Spectral Percepts: Cognition, Biology and the Origins of Musicality

This workshop has a Call for Fellowship Applications for Early Career Researchers from the Global South. Click here for more information. 

Scientific Topics  
The workshop aims to clarify the role of spectral percepts—including pitch, timbre, and consonance—in the evolution of musicality. Bringing together researchers from neurobiology, psychology, (ethno)musicology, and evolutionary biology, it seeks to characterize these percepts across species and cultures. Taking a broadly Tinbergian perspective, the workshop will integrate questions of mechanism, ontogeny, phylogeny, function, and cultural evolution. A secondary emphasis will be placed on pleasure: the role of reward and enjoyment in melody and harmony perception, as well as musical evolution. The workshop sidesteps rhythm and production. Focusing on the perceptual and affective dimensions of melody, harmony, and timbre, we revisit Darwin’s assumption that animals not only perceive melodies but also take pleasure in them. 

Goals
The workshop aims to foster new interdisciplinary research on how timbre, pitch, and reward/pleasure mechanisms might have shaped the evolution of musicality. It is conceived as both a scientific synthesis and a community-building exercise, designed to shape the next generation of work in this rapidly developing field. 

This translates into five concrete goals:

1. Identify common ground and outstanding controversies that merit deeper investigation, helping prioritize key questions in the field. 

2. Draft a collaborative research agenda grounded in cross-species and cross-cultural approaches, integrating work on the mechanism, ontogeny, phylogeny, function and cultural evolution of musicality. 

3. Establish interdisciplinary collaborations among researchers from different disciplines to advance this shared agenda.

4. Prepare and submit a proposal for a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B shortly after the workshop, aiming for publication in February 2027. The proposal will include abstracts and author lists for approximately 15 papers, comprising reviews, opinion papers, data papers, and original research.

Identify additional initiatives, including fundraising and publications, that can help sustain and expand the newly established research network, thereby supporting the shared research agenda.