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Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries

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Jacoby,  Nori       
Research Group Computational Auditory Perception, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Max Planck Society;
Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience, Columbia University;

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Kaya,  Ece       
Research Group Neural and Environmental Rhythms, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Max Planck Society;
Cognitive Science Master Program, Bogazici University;

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Anglada-Tort,  Manuel       
Research Group Computational Auditory Perception, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Max Planck Society;
Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London;

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Harrison,  Peter M. C.       
Research Group Computational Auditory Perception, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Max Planck Society;
Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge ;

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Citation

Jacoby, N., Polak, R., Grahn, J. A., Cameron, D. J., Lee, K. M., Godoy, R., et al. (2024). Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries. Nature Human Behaviour. doi:10.1038/s41562-023-01800-9.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000F-3E08-4
Abstract
Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random ‘seed’ rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of ‘telephone’), such that their biases (the prior) could be estimated from the distribution of reproductions. Every tested group showed a sparse prior with peaks at integer-ratio rhythms. However, the importance of different integer ratios varied across groups, often reflecting local musical practices. Our results suggest a common feature of music cognition: discrete rhythm ‘categories’ at small-integer ratios. These discrete representations plausibly stabilize musical systems in the face of cultural transmission but interact with culture-specific traditions to yield the diversity that is evident when mental representations are probed across many cultures.