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