Music Cognition Group

The Music Cognition Group (MCG) is part of Music Studies, the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), and Amsterdam Brain and Cognition (ABC) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and is housed at LAB42, Science Park Amsterdam.

Our research offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the capacity to perceive, make, and appreciate music (‘musicality’ for short). It asks what music is for and why every human culture has it, whether musicality is a uniquely human capacity, and what biological and cognitive mechanisms underlie it.

The current research program aims to identify the basic mechanisms that constitute the cognitive and biological basis of musicality, as well as developing theoretical, computational and empirical methods for analyzing various musicality phenotypes.

Meet our researchers Media attention F.A.Q.

What is music cognition?

We are all born with a predisposition for music, a predisposition that develops spontaneously and is refined by listening to music. Nearly everyone possesses the musical skills essential to experiencing and appreciating music. Think of “relative pitch,” recognizing a melody separately from the exact pitch or tempo at which it is sung, and “beat perception,” hearing regularity in a varying rhythm. Even human newborns turn out to be sensitive to intonation or melody, rhythm, and the dynamics of the sounds in their surroundings. Everything suggests that human biology is already primed for music at birth with respect to both the perception and enjoyment of listening.

Human musicality is clearly special; Musicality being a set of natural, spontaneously developing traits based on, and constrained by, our cognitive abilities (attention, memory, expectation) and our biological predisposition. But what makes it special? Is it because we appear to be the only animals with such a vast musical repertoire? Is our musical predisposition unique, like our linguistic ability? Or is musicality something with a long evolutionary history that we share with other animals? (Honing, 2019).

Latest news

Henkjan Honing elected member of the Academia Europaea

25 Apr 2025

Henkjan Honing, Professor of Music Cognition at the UvA, has been elected as a member of the Academia Europaea’s The Human Mind and its Complexity section. The Academia Europaea is a European Academy of Humanities, Letters and Sciences. Among its members are seventy-two Nobel Laureates. Membership is by invitation, made after peer group nomination, scrutiny and confirmation as to the scholarship and eminence of the individual in their chosen field.

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Rhythmus im Blut. Sind Tiere musikalisch?

7 Dec 2024

From 7 December 2024 online at ARTE: The Music Animal (2022, CBC) featuring profs. Henkjan Honing, Yuko Hattori, Ani Patel and others. | "Musik ist ein Rätsel der Evolution. Menschen singen, tanzen, fühlen den Beat. Diese Fähigkeit, Musik wahrzunehmen, zu genießen und selbst zu produzieren, nennt man Musikalität. Doch ist der Homo sapiens die einzige musikalische Spezies? Die Dokumentation gibt Einblicke in die bisherige Erforschung von Musikalität und Rhythmus in Natur und Tierwelt auf der Suche nach ihren Ursprüngen."

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Interested in a challenging postdoc position in Amsterdam?

6 Nov 2024

Are you looking for a postdoctoral position where you can combine insights from music cognition with biology and cognitive science? If you are excited about doing this kind of research in an interdisciplinary environment, with a team of smart and friendly colleagues, then you may want to join us.

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Lecture by Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (co-organised by ILLC, MCG and Vossius Center)

9 Oct 2024

On 19th November, the composer, performer and music theorist Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin from Kazakhstan will visit the ILLC to explore contacts with our community.

During his visit, he will also give a talk titled "Quantum Music and Logic of Sound and Silence" discussing the connections between contemporary mathematics, logic, and philosophy with modern avant-garde music.

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Latest publications

Burchardt, L. S., Hoeschele, M., Honing, H., Large, E., Merker, B., & Schneider, J. (2025). Chapter 1: What is rhythm and how can we study it? Center for Open Science. DOI 10.31219/osf.io/69v5a_v1

Henkjan

Finkensiep, C., Ericson, P., Klassmann, S., & Rohrmeier, M. (2025). Chord Types and Figuration: A Bayesian Learning Model of Extended Chord Profiles. Music & Science, 8. DOI 10.1177/20592043241291661

Christoph

Li, J., Baker, D. J., Burgoyne, J. A., Han, H., Henry, N., Lostanlen, V., Sadakata, M., {Van der Vlist}, M., {T. M. van Schaik}, F., Janmaat, K. R. L., & Honing, H. (2025). Is Pitch Indispensable for Music Recognition?: Robust Music Recognition Under Spectral and Temporal Degradations in BaYaka Hunter-Gatherers. https://www.icmpc2025.abcogmus.com/

Henkjan

Ashley

MakikoDavid

Li, J., Henry, N., Han, H., Lostanlen, V., Burgoyne, J. A., & Honing, H. (2025). What do we listen to when listening to familiar music?: A large-scale cross-cultural study probing the capacity for music using a variety of corpora. https://www.icmpc2025.abcogmus.com/

Henkjan

Ashley

ten Cate, C. J., & Honing, H. (2025). Precursors of music and language in animals. In The Oxford Handbook of Language and Music. Oxford University Press. DOI 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192894700.013.0026

Henkjan

Bouwer, F. L., Háden, G. P., & Honing, H. (2024). Probing Beat Perception with Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) in Human Adults, Newborns, and Nonhuman Primates. In Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology (pp. 227–256). Springer International Publishing. DOI 10.1007/978-3-031-60183-5_13

HenkjanFleur

Burgoyne, {John Ashley} and Henkjan Honing. (2024). Rasch models for quantifying the strength of musical memory and the feeling of knowing. https://sites.google.com/york.ac.uk/escom12/home

Henkjan

Ashley

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