Music is universal in all human cultures, but why? What gives us the ability to hear sound as music? Are we the only musical species–or was Darwin right when he said every animal with a backbone should be able to perceive, if not enjoy music? Professor Henkjan Honing is on a mission to find out.

Learn more

Henkjan Honing's website
Music Cognition Group Blog
The Evolving Animal Orchestra - Henkjan Honing
What makes us musical animals - Henkjan Honing lecture
Henkjan Honing TedX Amsterdam
Snowball dancing to the Backstreet Boys
Ronan the sea lion
Songs to make the forest happy
It turns out we were born to groove - beat perception study

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Credits

This episode was written and produced by Ray Pang and Meredith Johnson. Sound design, mixing, and scoring by Ray Pang. Our editor is Audrey Quinn. Theme music by Henry Nagle, additional music by Blue Dot Sessions and Lee Roservere.

This episode uses many sounds from Freesound.org, including:

Neon Dreams: A Retro-Futuristic Synthwave Track - Instrument 02 by Robbnix - License: Attribution 4.0

Music Box, Happy Birthday.wav - by InspectorJ - License: Attribution 4.0

Episode 742: Author, Date, and Audience of Revelation, with James Jordan