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Is Music In Our Genes?
Children seem to have a natural gravitation towards music.
Music is wonderfully human.
I have two grandchildren, one aged almost three and the other 2 years and a bit. Both children, from the time they could hold their heads up, displayed an innate sense of rhythm, particularly when the music being played had a certain cadence. Both children though enjoy different beats and tempos which is interesting. Seems they each have different musical taste.
Often, when looking after either child, the radio is playing in the background with a variety of talk and music interspersed. Now and then a music track is played that catches the attention of one of the children. He or she stops what they are doing and begins to jig or sway to the rhythm of the music. It does not happen with all the music tracks or with all the music tracks that have a beat, just an occasional track.
This jigging and swaying caused me to do a bit of digging on the net and I was quite surprised by the amount of research carried out on the subject. It seems the ability to follow a beat is called beat induction. Neither bonobo monkeys nor chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, are capable of beat induction. It is considered both a uniquely human trait and a cognitive building block of music.
