Universality and diversity in human song

Mehr, Samuel A.; Singh, Manvir; Knox, Dean; Ketter, Daniel M.; Pickens-Jones, Daniel; Atwood, S.; Lucas, Christopher; Jacoby, Nori; Egner, Alena A.; Hopkins, Erin J.; Howard, Rhea M.; Hartshorne, Joshua K.; Jennings, Mariela V.; Simson, Jan; Bainbridge, Constance M.; Pinker, Steven; O’Donnell, Timothy J.; Krasnow, Max M.; Glowacki, Luke

doi:10.1126/science.aax0868

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Universality and diversity in human song

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Jacoby, Nori
Research Group Computational Auditory Perception, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Mehr, S. A., Singh, M., Knox, D., Ketter, D. M., Pickens-Jones, D., Atwood, S., et al. (2019). Universality and diversity in human song. Science, 366(6468): eaax0868. doi:10.1126/science.aax0868.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0005-518E-0

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.