Music from around the world shares universal features Clearviewimages RF / Alamy Stock Photo
Whether it’s a love song, dance song or lullaby, music shares similar underlying structural elements, according to a ground-breaking study. In fact, we even use the same simple building blocks to make melodies, suggesting humans might have an innate “grammar” for music.
While music seems to be everywhere, scientists haven’t previously found much evidence to suggest it has any universal features. The prevailing view is that music is so diverse that few, if any, universals exist.
Settling the matter empirically has been difficult, because research often focuses on individual cultures and musical contexts, says Samuel Mehr of Harvard University. So Mehr and his colleagues decided to use data science to try to understand what was universal and what varied in music across the world.
To do this, they developed a database containing around 5000 detailed descriptions of songs and their performances in 60 human societies. They created another database to analyse recordings taken of four types of music from 30 different regions, which included dance songs, healing songs, love songs and lullabies.
Read more: Crowdsourcing lets the masses compose song one note at a time
Mehr and his colleagues only included vocal songs, because the voice is a musical instrument shared by all cultures. The societies were mostly small, and the researchers believe they are representative of cultural diversity across the globe.
Not only was music present in all societies that the authors had information on, but distinct patterns emerged. For example, songs used in similar contexts shared similar features. Ritual healing songs were more repetitive than dance songs, and dance songs were quicker and more rhythmic than lullabies.
But the most striking discovery was that all cultures had melodies centred around a base tone. For example, starting the song Twinkle, twinkle little star on the note C means that notes in a C major scale are used. In a tonal song like this, the note C offers listeners a sense of stability and feels like “home” – and is often the note on which the song ends.
When Mehr and his colleagues asked music scholars to listen to the songs, they overwhelmingly classified them as tonal, and an algorithm fed transcriptions of the songs accurately predicted the same tonal centre that the experts judged the song as having.
“In the way that all languages in the world have a set of phonemes – all words in the world are made up of small sets of speech sounds – so it is with melodies. All melodies can be built up from a small set of notes,” says W. Tecumseh Fitch at the University of Vienna, Austria.
The authors suggest this might be a sign that humans have a universal “musical grammar”, much like the universal linguistic grammar we are thought to have.
“This suggests there is a biological basis that is constant across all humans, but interpreted differently in different human cultures,” says Fitch.
jordanlund on November 22nd, 2019 at 04:37 UTC »
You can actually see this in action in the documentary Ghengis Blues. Blues musician Paul Pena travels to Mongolia in his search of Tuvan throat singing.
While there, he plays guitar music for some kids. I feel safe in saying these Mongolian kids have never heard Delta Blues music in their lives, but watch the reaction. It's immediate and exactly like kids in America.
BrockHeBe on November 22nd, 2019 at 01:16 UTC »
Having to do with the harmonic series, where different pitches (frequency values) resonate more naturally with certain other values. This creates a hierarchy of “consonance and dissonance” which all humans are privy to.
mvea on November 22nd, 2019 at 00:08 UTC »
The title of the post is a copy and paste from the title and first paragraph of the linked academic press release here:
Journal Reference:
Universality and diversity in human song
Samuel A. Mehr1,2,3,, Manvir Singh4,, Dean Knox5, Daniel M. Ketter6,7, Daniel Pickens-Jones8, S. Atwood2, Christopher Lucas9, Nori Jacoby10, Alena A. Egner2, Erin J. Hopkins2, Rhea M. Howard2, Joshua K. Hartshorne11, Mariela V. Jennings11, Jan Simson2,12, Constance M. Bainbridge2, Steven Pinker2, Timothy J. O’Donnell13, Max M. Krasnow2, Luke Glowacki14,*
Science 22 Nov 2019: Vol. 366, Issue 6468, eaax0868
Link: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6468/eaax0868
DOI: 10.1126/science.aax0868
Cross-cultural analysis of song
It is unclear whether there are universal patterns to music across cultures. Mehr et al. examined ethnographic data and observed music in every society sampled (see the Perspective by Fitch and Popescu). For songs specifically, three dimensions characterize more than 25% of the performances studied: formality of the performance, arousal level, and religiosity. There is more variation in musical behavior within societies than between societies, and societies show similar levels of within-society variation in musical behavior. At the same time, one-third of societies significantly differ from average for any given dimension, and half of all societies differ from average on at least one dimension, indicating variability across cultures.
Science, this issue p. eaax0868; see also p. 944
Structured Abstract
INTRODUCTION
Music is often assumed to be a human universal, emerging from an evolutionary adaptation specific to music and/or a by-product of adaptations for affect, language, motor control, and auditory perception. But universality has never actually been systematically demonstrated, and it is challenged by the vast diversity of music across cultures. Hypotheses of the evolutionary function of music are also untestable without comprehensive and representative data on its forms and behavioral contexts across societies.
RATIONALE
We conducted a natural history of song: a systematic analysis of the features of vocal music found worldwide. It consists of a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of mostly small-scale societies, and a discography of audio recordings of the music itself. We then applied tools of computational social science, which minimize the influence of sampling error and other biases, to answer six questions. Does music appear universally? What kinds of behavior are associated with song, and how do they vary among societies? Are the musical features of a song indicative of its behavioral context (e.g., infant care)? Do the melodic and rhythmic patterns of songs vary systematically, like those patterns found in language? And how prevalent is tonality across musical idioms?
RESULTS
Analysis of the ethnography corpus shows that music appears in every society observed; that variation in song events is well characterized by three dimensions (formality, arousal, religiosity); that musical behavior varies more within societies than across them on these dimensions; and that music is regularly associated with behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. Analysis of the discography corpus shows that identifiable acoustic features of songs (accent, tempo, pitch range, etc.) predict their primary behavioral context (love, healing, etc.); that musical forms vary along two dimensions (melodic and rhythmic complexity); that melodic and rhythmic bigrams fall into power-law distributions; and that tonality is widespread, perhaps universal.
CONCLUSION
Music is in fact universal: It exists in every society (both with and without words), varies more within than between societies, regularly supports certain types of behavior, and has acoustic features that are systematically related to the goals and responses of singers and listeners. But music is not a fixed biological response with a single prototypical adaptive function: It is produced worldwide in diverse behavioral contexts that vary in formality, arousal, and religiosity. Music does appear to be tied to specific perceptual, cognitive, and affective faculties, including language (all societies put words to their songs), motor control (people in all societies dance), auditory analysis (all musical systems have signatures of tonality), and aesthetics (their melodies and rhythms are balanced between monotony and chaos). These analyses show how applying the tools of computational social science to rich bodies of humanistic data can reveal both universal features and patterns of variability in culture, addressing long-standing debates about each.