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Updated: Oct 18, 2025

fMRI Mapping of Brain Activity Associated with the Vocal Production of Consonant and Dissonant Intervals
Published on: May 23, 2017
Why musical hierarchies?
Courtney B Hilton1,2, Rie Asano3, Cedric Boeckx4
1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA02138, USA. courtneyhilton@g.harvard.edu.
Abstract:
Credible signaling may have provided a selection pressure for producing and discriminating increasingly elaborate proto-musical signals. But, why evolve them to have hierarchical structure? We argue that the hierarchality of tonality and meter is a byproduct of domain-general mechanisms evolved for reasons other than credible signaling.
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