Universality and Diversity in Human Song

Overview

Journal Science

Specialty Science

Date 2019 Nov 23

PMID 31753969

Citations 130

Authors

Samuel A Mehr

Manvir Singh

Dean Knox

Daniel M Ketter

Daniel Pickens-Jones

S Atwood

Christopher Lucas

Nori Jacoby

Alena A Egner

Erin J Hopkins

Rhea M Howard

Joshua K Hartshorne

Mariela V Jennings

Jan Simson

Constance M Bainbridge

Steven Pinker

Timothy J ODonnell

Max M Krasnow

Luke Glowacki

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

What is universal about music, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world's societies, as well as a discography of audio recordings. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music (including songs with words) appears in every society observed; that music varies along three dimensions (formality, arousal, religiosity), more within societies than across them; and that music is associated with certain behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography-analyzed through machine summaries, amateur and expert listener ratings, and manual transcriptions-reveals that acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral context; that tonality is widespread, perhaps universal; that music varies in rhythmic and melodic complexity; and that elements of melodies and rhythms found worldwide follow power laws.

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