- Bertolo, Mila;
- Bertolo, Mila;
- Bertolo, Mila;
- Bertolo, Mila;
- Müllensiefen, Daniel;
- Peretz, Isabelle;
- Woolley, Sarah Cushing;
- Sakata, Jon;
- Mehr, Samuel;
- Mehr, Samuel
Since Darwin (1871), researchers have proposed that
musicality evolved in a reproductive context in which males
produce music to signal their mate quality. The extent to
which evidence supports this contention, however, remains
unclear. Related traits in many non-human animals are
sexually differentiated, and while some sex differences in
human auditory perception have been documented, the pattern
of results is murky. Here, we study melodic discrimination,
mistuning perception, and beat alignment perception in
360,009 men and 194,291 women from 208 countries. We
find that, in contrast to other non-music human traits, and in
contrast to non-human traits, there was no overall advantage
for either sex, and the observed sex differences were
minuscule (Cohen’s d: 0.009 - 0.11) and of inconsistent
direction. These results do not provide compelling support for
human music perception being a sexually dimorphic trait, and
therefore it is unlikely to have been shaped by sexual
selection.