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This first lecture focused on the main aspects of current research in biomusicology : the question of the origin of music and that of its characteristic traits, known as " musical universals ".
In a first part of the lecture, biomusicology was introduced by considering the broad outlines of Darwinian evolutionary theory and its possible application to the question of the origin of music. Through this paradigm, a series of questions were addressed :
In the second part, two aspects of current research into the origins of music were illustrated. The first concerns the search for musical universals, which was discussed through a recent work by Patrick Savage and his collaborators, involving three teams from the universities of Tokyo in Japan, McMaster in Canada, and Exeter in Great Britain (Savage et al., 2015). These authors sought to identify the musical traits most frequently encountered in diverse world music, known as " statistical universals of music ". The other aspect concerns the development by Josh McDermott's group at MIT of a method for processing voxels from functional brain imaging, which reveals brain regions dedicated to music (Norman-Haigneré et al., 2015). This approach opens up the possibility of extracting richer information from dynamic functional imaging data than ever before, revealing the role of these various brain regions.
