UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Unraveling the origins of musicality: Beyond music as an epiphenomenon of language

The two target articles address the origins of music in complementary ways. However, both proposals focus on overt musical behaviour, largely ignoring the role of perception and cognition, and they blur the boundaries between the potential origins of language and music. To resolve this, an alternative research strategy is proposed that focusses on the core cognitive components of musicality. target music musicality in complementary ways. Savage et al theory that proposes music to be a relatively recent cultural invention that then further evolved though gene-culture coevolution. In contrast, Mehr et al. issue) present a single hypothesis capturing the biological origins of musical behaviour, suggesting a long evolutionary history.