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The Biology of Music

Musical activity, like much other human behaviour, stems from two components. One is experience. The other is that inherent property of the individual without which training will achieve little, which we call musicality. This potential for musical activity ranges from virtually zero to exceptional gift. Instinctively, the biologist would suppose it would be genetically determined, because this would provide an acceptable explanation for the variation which exists, and for the production of an individual with far greater or less musicality than his parents; it would similarly account for the inheritance of musicality through several generations. But the problem is not only to discover what is inherited. Genetic mechanisms determine the detailed structure of the body, which includes the whole of the hearing machinery. The auditory system is immensely complex, including the "ear" for receiving sound and turning its information into electrical signals, and a series of processing and relay stations inter-connected with other parts of the body, which appear similar in essentials to that of other higher animals; it is also connected to the cortex of the brain in which sound becomes a conscious event. It would generally be assumed that the anatomy of the pathway would be developed under genetic control, and that to a very large extent the processing of signals in the pathway would be automatic. On the other hand, though the cortex must be structured by the developmental processes, its activity is believed primarily to depend on training and experience. So it would seem logical to attribute the inherent property of musicality which is inherited, to a level below the cortex. But many kinds of auditory test indicate that the ability for ordinary hearing does not differ significantly amongst normal people regardless of their musicality. This suggests a paradox: either the hearing machinery contributes nothing to musicality, which must therefore reside in a genetically pre-determined structuring of the cortex, or the auditory machinery must be capable of consistent behaviour to one kind of sound, but have very variable behaviour for another kind of sound. That statement presumes there is a biological difference between musical and non-musical sound, a matter this paper discusses.