Major-minor and consonance-dissonance are two profound elements of Western tonal music, and have strong affective connotations for Western listeners. This review summarizes recent evidence on the neurocognitive basis of major-minor and consonance-dissonance by presenting studies on their processing and how it is affected by maturation, musical enculturation, and music training. Based on recent findings in the field, it is proposed that both classifications, particularly consonance-dissonance, have partly innate, biologically hard-wired properties. These properties can make them discriminable even for newborn infants and individuals living outside the Western music culture and, to a small extent, reflect their affective connotations in Western music. Still, musical enculturation and active music training drastically modify the sensory/acoustical as well as affective processing of major-minor and consonance-dissonance. This leads to considerable variance in psychophysiological and behavioral responses to these musical classifications.

Adults can extract the underlying beat from music, and entrain their movements with that beat. Although infants and children are poor at synchronizing their movements to auditory stimuli, recent findings suggest they are perceptually sensitive to the beat. We examined five-year-old children’s perceptual sensitivity to musical beat alignment (adapting the adult task of Iversen & Patel, 2008). We also examined whether sensitivity is affected by metric complexity, and whether perceptual sensitivity correlates with cognitive skills. On each trial of the complex Beat Alignment Test (cBAT) children were presented with two successive videos of puppets drumming to music with simple or complex meter. One puppet’s drumming was synchronized with the beat of the music while the other had either incorrect tempo or incorrect phase, and children were asked to select the better drummer. In two experiments, five-year-olds were able to detect beat misalignments in simple meter music significantly better than beat misalignments in complex meter music for both phase errors and tempo errors, with performance for complex meter music at chance levels. Although cBAT performance correlated with short-term memory in Experiment One, the relationship held for both simple and complex meter, so cannot explain the superior performance for culturally typical meters.

IN MOST ADULTS, PITCH MEMORY FOR SINGLE tones is of short duration, and the presence of interference reduces performance in pitch matching tasks.We show that 6-month-old infants can remember the pitch of a tone for at least 2.5 s but that, like adults, their memory is disrupted by tones interpolated between repetitions of the tone-to-be-remembered. For both infants and adults, we found a significant negative correlation between the number of interference tones and proportion correct in detecting a change in pitch. Performance reached chance levels with 5 interference tones for infants, and 15 interference tones for adults. This indicates that although there may be a developmental increase with age in the length of time a memory can be held, for both 6-month-old infants and adults, memory for the absolute pitch of isolated tones fades rapidly.

McDermott and Hauser (2005) and Justus and Hutsler (2005) argue that in order for music to be an evolutionary adaptation, and not an exaptation, music must be constrained by innate factors that are specific to music and that evolved because music conferred survival advantages. I argue that the dichotomy between adaptation and exaptation is not very clear for higher cognitive functions such as music and language, because genes set up general neural architectures and learning mechanisms, rather than specifying the details of what they will represent, and that such higher cognitive functions are therefore dependent on interactions between genes and experience. Furthermore, because higher cognitive functions depend on a common set of mechanisms such as sensory encoding strategies, working memory capacity, working memory processes, longterm memory encoding and retrieval, and attentional focusing, it is difficult to make arguments about innate specificity. Thus, the question of whether music is an evolutionary adaptation appears to depend on whether or not music conferred survival advantages, a question that is difficult to answer.