A study from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has shed new light on the human brain’s seemingly innate sensitivity to music. The research, published in Nature Communications, claims to have found evidence that music-sensitivity has been hard-wired into our brains through evolution, without prior exposure to musical stimuli or teaching being necessary.
While this had been suspected previously, due to observations of babies and Amazonian tribes people, the KAIST team used an artificial deep neural network (DNN) to mimic human brain behaviour and trained it to recognise a variety of real-world sounds from Google’s Audioset.
The study found that certain neurons within the network selectively responded to both instrumental and vocal music, though showed minimal sensitivity to non-musical sounds.
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Interestingly, inhibiting those neurons significantly compromised the network’s ability to recognise other natural sounds. This could indicate that the human brain may have evolved an innate feel for music to enhance its ability to process a wide range of non-musical sounds too, according to the researchers.
“The results of our study imply that evolutionary pressure has contributed to forming the universal basis for processing musical information in various cultures,” said physics professor Hawoong Jung, who led the study.
“We look forward to this artificially built model with human-like musicality [becoming] an original model for various applications including AI music generation, musical therapy, and for research in musical cognition,” he said.
