Study reveals music's universal patterns across societies worldwide
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[November 23, 2019]
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - 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.
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.
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"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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![](../images/112319pics/news_k19.jpg)
Villagers play traditional musical instruments during an event
celebrating National Paddy Day, also called Asar Pandra, that marks
the commencement of rice crop planting in paddy fields as monsoon
season arrives, in Dhading, Nepal, June 30, 2019. REUTERS/Navesh
Chitrakar/File Photo
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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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