The question has turned into a burgeoning scientific field—one that looks at everything from boy-band-loving cockatoos to head-bobbing sea lions—with implications for how and why music evolved in people.

Every human culture through time that we know of has evolved some kind of music, says Aniruddh Patel, a cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, who spoke at a presentation during the ongoing American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference.

But how deeply rooted our penchant for music is still eludes researchers. It could be that music is simply an extension of our ability to imitate sounds, while others including Charles Darwin have proposed that a sense of rhythm is common in all animals