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Music Science

Study Reveals Music's Universal Patterns Across Societies Worldwide (reuters.com) 45

From love songs to dance tunes to lullabies, music made in disparate cultures worldwide displays certain universal patterns, according to a study by researchers who suggest a commonality in the way human minds create music. From a report: The study focused on musical recordings and ethnographic records from 60 societies around the world including such diverse cultures as the Highland Scots in Scotland, Nyangatom nomads in Ethiopia, Mentawai rain forest dwellers in Indonesia, the Saramaka descendants of African slaves in Suriname and Aranda hunter-gatherers in Australia. Music was broadly found to be associated with behaviors including infant care, dance, love, healing, weddings, funerals, warfare, processions and religious rituals. The researchers detected strong similarities in musical features across the various cultures, according to Samuel Mehr, a Harvard University research associate in psychology and the lead author of the study published in the journal Science. "The study gives credence to the idea that there is some sort of set of governing rules for how human minds produce music worldwide. And that's something we could not really test until we had a lot of data about music from many different cultures," Mehr said.
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Study Reveals Music's Universal Patterns Across Societies Worldwide

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  • Study (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by ArhcAngel ( 247594 )
    is wrong as usual.
  • by Aristos Mazer ( 181252 ) on Saturday November 30, 2019 @01:32AM (#59470272)
    The article does not mention a single aspect that is common across cultures. It says lullabyes sound the same... does that mean pitch? Beats per minute? Do they all sound like Ozzie Osborne when played backward? And there is NO LINK to the original study publication. Seriously... this is AWFUL science reporting. Find a better source for this article, Slashdot!
  • by at10u8 ( 179705 ) on Saturday November 30, 2019 @01:42AM (#59470278)
    Universality and diversity in human song Science 22 Nov 2019: Vol. 366, Issue 6468, eaax0868 DOI: 10.1126/science.aax0868 https://science.sciencemag.org... [sciencemag.org]
  • and of course it wouldn't be possible for musicians to travel to other parts of the world to get ideas for their compositions.

    • “Instead of music being primarily shaped by the culture it is from, the social function of the piece of music influences its features much more strongly.”

      Be its function, form, or where it's from, there's something to be said for music somehow sharing space in everyone's head... but me thinks some composers take the next step, go outside the accepted norms, defy convention and those 'Universal Patterns Across Societies Worldwide', like Philip Glass silently sitting in front of a piano keyboard, or Milton Babbitt's 'Ensembles for Synthesizer' (1964): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5n1pZn4izI [youtube.com]
      or Olivier Messiaen's 'Quatre études de rythme' (1949-1950)

  • by Evtim ( 1022085 ) on Saturday November 30, 2019 @03:34AM (#59470332)

    The subject of the study is quite interesting. I have thought about it and heard people asking it: why is it that some tunes catch on and other do not? And why so very few people created the vast majority of music we like to listen to?

    Consider the classical period of concert music. I guess the composers explored the "phase space" of musical phrases and compositions that was in front of them. In a relatively short time the majority of what we listen to from that period was created by very few individuals. Did they extract all the catchy tunes from the endless (but not all harmonic and musical) possible variations (BTW, is the number of harmonic phrases finite or infinite?) so that is why there are no Mozarts today? What is so special about those tunes that they became immortal?

    Regarding musicality and sense of rhythm, what I have read is that it is an universal human trait. To the point that a person with no sense of music and rhythm, who does not like any music is considered deviant. And that humans enjoy music and dance greatly. Music has proven therapeutic effects; it has an enormous influence on our feelings and emotions. What you listen to at age 12-18 stays with you for life. Young people associate themselves with a particular style of music so strongly that a fanship and heated arguments to rival football fans are common. It seems there never was a society, or a tribe, that did not make music, dance and song. Personally, I love all art and above all cannot even imagine my life without music and literature. It seems the majority of humanity shares that with me regarding music.

    What's this all about?

    Somebody should write a thick book to summarize what we know so far. It seems to me that music is one of the most fascinating aspects of our lives.

    • by sycodon ( 149926 )

      I would suggest auditing a Music History class at your local university or try this book. [amazon.com]

    • music - the crux is in the vocals; either you sing or mentally sing along. And singing is altering your breathing - how the exhale air is split into silences and non-silences. And breath is mind (two sides of same coin). So some tunes are like great statements which can calm a mind - things like say 'life is beautiful; you are eternal; no need to fear; love others". So music is liked by humans just like say they love to hv a good deep sleep. NOTE just like any mood altering substance (alcohol, drugs), the
  • by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Saturday November 30, 2019 @07:45AM (#59470442)

    The study looks well thought out, but what I read didn't make it clear to me how well they controlled for exposure to other cultures. Music seems to travel between cultures fairly easily - consider jazz, developed in the US, but clearly having roots in both European and African music, and now distributed very widely around the world.

    It would have been interesting to see some metric for communication between cultures - maybe some non-musical cultural markers, and musical similarities.

    For me personally, only the music I grew up with seems to have a strong impact on me, music from other cultures seems random to me. (to be clear, I'm not implying it IS random, but rather that my brain does not lock onto its patterns in the way it does for music that is familiar to me)

    • The simple answer is they didn't control for it, and ignored obvious counterpoints which undermine their Universality Hypothesis. For example, traditional music from various Native American tribes has absolutely zero similarity to music which originated off continent. There's no rhythmic similarity or melodic qualities, it's atonal and irregular and doesn't use any sort of chord structure. The only thing universal about music is that people make noise with their bodies and often combine that with noise ma
  • Noam Chomsky, decades ago, used to publish useful theories about "biolinguistics", about human speech involving "the idea that the mind contains inherent structures to understand language, perception, and though". His theories have been proven quite wrong by learning more about how neurology works and studying languages without the common "languages of conquerors" that most human languages evolved from. But the idea that there is a shared underlying biological structure to language, or to music, remains a c

    • His theories have been proven quite wrong

      Woah, that is definitely not true.

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Many of his theories have been proven wrong. Many others can't be tested. And it has been reasonably well shown that if there is an "ur language" it's pre-linguistic.

        I happen to believe that there is such a thing, but it's not closely tied to any observable feature. I.e., it reinforces some patterns and ant-reinforces others, but it doesn't initiate them. It's more of the form of "it feels right to make this utterance" or not than "you do it this way". I know of no way to test this, and I note that it

        • And it has been reasonably well shown that if there is an "ur language" it's pre-linguistic.

          This is not Noam Chomsky's idea at all. I think you need to find a different source of information, because whatever one you are reading is misleading you.

          Many of his theories have been proven wrong

          Which theory are you talking about here? Or is it just some vague thing you heard somewhere?

          • Then, please, explain yourself what Noam Chomsky's "idea" was. I personally brought up the specific idea of biolinguistics.

            • Your specific error was to claim the Chomsky's ideas "have been proven quite wrong." That is a direct quote from your post.

              I don't know where you picked that idea up, but it had me rolling on the floor laughing. You might as well just say that you don't understand Chomsky and be done with it.

              There's no shame to that: computational linguistics is not an easy field to get into and the concepts aren't particularly intuitive.
              • Oh, dear. Applying the "proof by authority" fallacy for an authority you've not even named, for a belief you've not even named? If you have some understanding of the field of computational linguistics, which is a commonly claimed _descendant_ of his holosphies but is not in fact rooted in his philosphies, is not an effective refutation of the claim that his ideas have been proven wrong.

                Chomsky linked the "ur-language" to an underlying genetically based common language. The problem is that language in every

                • No, that's just wrong. Chomsky never proposed an ur-language the way you are describing it. I don't know what your source is but you should reconsider them as a source of your information.
                  • I heard Chomsky speak on his "universal language" concepts in the 1980's. Hhe was linking the concept of a universal language with that of an "ur-language" at that time. The concepts are intertwined.

                    Interestingly, Chomsky has since discarded most of the universal grammer idea! There is a summary of his scholarly retraction at https://dlc.hypotheses.org/126... [hypotheses.org] not realized he'd done this, and am impressed with his ability to step back from such an error when presented with robust evidence.

      • The "biolinguistics" idea broke down badly as we learned more about computer language, about assembly languages versus higher level languages. The straight deduction from Chomsky's earlier, non-political linguistic work is that there is a common human language, neurologically constructed, and that like the "Platonic ideal" of a chair itself, that all language and language structures were based on this common language. The idea broke down when we examined languages of extremely isolated groups, such as the t

        • The straight deduction from Chomsky's earlier, non-political linguistic work is that there is a common human language, neurologically constructed, and that like the "Platonic ideal" of a chair itself, that all language and language structures were based on this common language.

          No this is wrong. To quickly understand his ideas, the fastest way is to refer to the Chomsky Hierarchy (like this [wikipedia.org]).

          Chomsky's core idea (or one of them, I suppose) is that humans have mental structures that allow them to understand Type-0 languages, and animals do not (and also as an aside that behavioralism is not enough by itself to enable a human to learn such languages).

          If you're having trouble with the Chomsky hierarchy, then you're going to have trouble understanding his theories so you should s

  • A plucked string* has inherent properties regardless of whether it's on a koto, balalaika, sitar, or Fender Strat. The overtone series (harmonics) influences what is perceived as consonant or dissonant. Everything on top of that is acculturation, but the physical properties of sound are the same.

    -k.
    * - or a column of air, a metal or wooden bar struck with a mallet, a membrane hit with a stick

    • The 7 or 12 notes are like alphabets of a language. What matters is what sentences/book you write with them. The physics of resonance (as pythagoras found - ratios of small integers like 1/2, 2/3, 4/5, 7/8) are irrelevant. What is a puzzle is why some sequences of the alphabets calms a human while others don't. The great music composers some how get those sequences/lines of the alphabet which fellow humans (a vast majority) find pleasant/calming to listen.
  • "About 3% are consumed via other orifices."

  • Not clear if they've discovered some specific correlation that was previously unknown or if they just 'discovered' what musicians have known for centuries.

  • Humans are closely related no matter where they are from, so the DNA is almost indistinguishable and the evolved traits highly similar. The problem is it's hard to ascertain just how much of our culture is purely biological. Just because people migrated thousands of miles away from where they originated does not mean they did not carry cultural traits with them. Still, there is probably some evolutionary explanation to music.

It is not best to swap horses while crossing the river. -- Abraham Lincoln

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