{"id":228481,"date":"2026-01-07T02:26:17","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T08:26:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/humans-may-be-predisposed-to-understanding-the-complexities-of-music"},"modified":"2026-01-07T02:26:17","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T08:26:17","slug":"humans-may-be-predisposed-to-understanding-the-complexities-of-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/humans-may-be-predisposed-to-understanding-the-complexities-of-music","title":{"rendered":"Humans may be predisposed to understanding the complexities of music"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/humans-may-be-predisposed-to-understanding-the-complexities-of-music2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>There is a long-standing debate in the field of music cognition about the impact of musical training and whether formal training is needed to pick up higher-order tonal structures\u2014the overarching harmonic framework of a piece of music.<\/p>\n<p>New research from the University of Rochester, <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/doi\/10.1177\/09567976251400331\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Psychological Science<\/i>, offers fresh insight into that discussion. The findings suggest that nonmusicians have a surprisingly sophisticated ear when it comes to music.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFormal training in music\u2014including music theory\u2014fine-tunes the ear to pick up tonal patterns in music, like tonic, dominant, and cadences,\u201d says Elise Piazza, an assistant professor in the Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Neuroscience and the senior author of the study. \u201cBut it turns out that with zero training, people are actually picking up on those structures just from listening to music over the lifespan.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is a long-standing debate in the field of music cognition about the impact of musical training and whether formal training is needed to pick up higher-order tonal structures\u2014the overarching harmonic framework of a piece of music. New research from the University of Rochester, published in Psychological Science, offers fresh insight into that discussion. The [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-arts","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}