Origins of music traced to 30 Million Years back

November 12, 2013 : Music skills evolved at least 30 million years ago in the common ancestor of humans and monkeys. A new study that could help explains why chimpanzees drum on tree roots and monkey calls sound like singing revealed so. The study, published in the latest issue of Biology Letters, also suggests an answer to this chicken-and-egg question: Which came first, language or music? The answer appears to be music. For the study, Ravignani, a doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna's Department of Cognitive Biology, and his colleagues focused on an ability known as "dependency detection". This has to do with recognizing relationships between syllables, words and musical notes. In the study, squirrel monkeys sat in a sound booth and listened to a set of three novel patterns. (The researchers fed the monkeys insects between playbacks, so the monkeys quickly got to like this activity.) Whenever a pattern changed, similar to our hearing Do-Re-Fa, the monkeys stared longer, as if to say, "Huh?" The squirrel monkeys demonstrated that they understood sound patterns, and when they changed. This ability, central to language and music, therefore evolved at least 30 million years ago in the small and furry tree-dwelling primate that was the last common ancestor of humans and monkeys. It's likely that all primates today share the skills. Dependency Detection: Dependency Detection applies contingency table analysis to build a set of simple models of causes of a particular event's occurrence. It was designed to be the first step in a partially automated debugging process, which was originally developed for the Phoenix planning system. Consequently, the algorithm and the examples refer to failure recovery actions of the Phoenix planner and the failures that occurred during the planner's execution. It has been used as well for detecting sources of search inefficiency in another planning system.

What: Origins of music traced to 30 Million Years back When: November 12, 2013 Who: Ravignani, Doctoral Candidate Where: Department of Cognitive Biology, The University of Vienna, Austria How: Using “dependency detection