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 The study, published on Thursday, 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.
Penn State University anthropology professor Luke Glowacki, a
study co-author, said many ethnomusicologists have believed that
the features in a given piece of music are most heavily
influenced by the culture from which the music originates.
"We found something very different," Glowacki said. "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."
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"Dance songs sound a certain way around the world because they have
a specific function. Lullabies around the world sound a certain way
because they have a specific function. If music were entirely shaped
by culture and not human psychology you wouldn't expect these deep
similarities to emerge in extremely diverse cultures," Glowacki
added.
Manvir Singh, a graduate student in Harvard's department of human
evolutionary biology and another study co-author, noted that
lullabies tended to be slow and fluid across societies while dance
songs tended to be fast, lively, rhythmic and pulsating.
The researchers examined hundreds of recordings from libraries and
private collections globally.
"The fact that a lullaby, healing song or dance song from the
British Isles or anywhere else in the world has many musical
features in common with the same kind of song from hunter-gatherers
in Australia or horticulturalists in Africa is remarkable," Glowacki
said.
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)
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