Music and Movement Hardwired in Humans

Music and movement might share a common structure

Dec. 17, 2012, Courtesy of PNAS and WorldScience staff

Music and movement might share a common structure across disparate cultures, according to a study.

Researchers Thalia Wheatley of Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. and colleagues developed a computer program to generate both simple piano melodies and an animated bouncing ball.

The scientists then recruited 50 US college students and separated them into two equal groups. They then asked one group to move slider bars on a computer screen that controlled five melody related qualities — rate, jitter, direction, step size, and consonance — to reflect different emotions, such as "angry," "happy," "peaceful," "sad," and "scared."

The other group was asked to perform the same task, but the slider bars varied equivalent attributes of the ball’s movement in relation to the same emotions.

People who used music to express an emotion set the slider bars to the same positions as those who expressed the same emotion through movement, the scientists found, suggesting music and movement might share an underlying structure.

When a slightly modified version of the experiment was conducted among villagers in L’ak, a culturally isolated tribe in northeastern Cambodia, the investigators found that the features of emotional expression through music and movement are similar across cultures.

Unraveling the culturally universal features of music might help researchers uncover why and how music originated, Wheatley and colleagues argued.

"By studying universal features of music we can begin to map its evolutionary history," they wrote, reporting their findings in this week’s early online issue of the research journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Understanding the cross-modal nature of musical expression may in turn help us understand why and how music came to exist."

"The shared structure of emotional music and movement must be reflected in the organization of the brain," they added. They also cited past work by Stanislas Dehaene and Laurent Cohen at the University of Paris Sud and University of Paris VI, who have argued that sophisticated activities like reading and math "repurpose" brain areas that originally served for simpler purposes. Similarly, music may "recycle" brain areas that evolved for movement and speech, Wheatley and colleagues proposed.

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