Music Cognition Group

The Music Cognition Group (MCG) is part of the Department of Musicology, 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.

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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 researchersResearch agendaMedia attention
Universiteit van AmsterdamAmsterdam Music LabMusic Cognition Reading GroupMusicality Genomics ConsortiumToontjeHoger

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, or 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

Lecture by prof. Aniruddh D. Patel
Lecture by prof. Aniruddh D. Patel
16 Mar 2024
Heb jij ritmegevoel? [with subtitles]
Heb jij ritmegevoel? [with subtitles]
10 Mar 2024
Scientific American: It turns out we were born to groove
Scientific American: It turns out we were born to groove
14 Jan 2024
New study out today: Newborn babies have a natural affinity for ‘the beat’.
New study out today: Newborn babies have a natural affinity for ‘the beat’.
27 Nov 2023
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Latest publications

Bouwer, F. L., Fahrenfort, J. J., Millard, S. K., Kloosterman, N. A., & Slagter, H. A. (2023). A Silent Disco: Differential Effects of Beat-based and Pattern-based Temporal Expectations on Persistent Entrainment of Low-frequency Neural Oscillations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 35(6), 990–1020. DOI 10.1162/jocn_a_01985
Fleur
Burgoyne, J. A., Baker, D. J., & Honing, H. (2023). What a game can reveal about music perception: A psychometric analysis of the matching pairs game. International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition.
Ashley
Ashley
Henkjan
Henkjan
David
David
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Media attention

Ook jij hebt ritmegevoel, we bewijzen het hierUvN
Bas Cornelissen kijkt naar muziek als een wiskundige puzzelNRC
Maakt Joost Klein kans op Songfestivalwinst? ‘De top 10 moet lukken’Folia
Waarom is het zo fijn om te neuriën?NRC
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Music Matters

Latest posts from Henkjan Honing’s blog Music Matters

Interested in the origins of musicality?
Interested in the origins of musicality?
16 Mar 2024
Heb jij ritmegevoel? [Dutch]
Heb jij ritmegevoel? [Dutch]
9 Mar 2024
Feel like a musical memory challenge?
Feel like a musical memory challenge?
31 Dec 2023
Interested in a one-year postdoc position?
Interested in a one-year postdoc position?
21 Dec 2023
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