Universality and diversity in human song
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Samuel A. Mehr1,2,3,*, Manvir Singh4,*, Dean Knox5, Daniel M. Ketter6,7, Daniel Pickens-Jones8, S. Atwood2, Christopher Lucas9, Nori Jacoby10, Alena A. Egner2, Erin J. Hopkins2, Rhea M. Howard2, Joshua K. Hartshorne11, Mariela V. Jennings11, Jan Simson2,12, Constance M. Bainbridge2, Steven Pinker2, Timothy J. O’Donnell13, Max M. Krasnow2, Luke Glowacki14,*
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Science 22 Nov 2019:
Vol. 366, Issue 6468, eaax0868
DOI: 10.1126/science.aax0868
Cross-cultural analysis of song
It is unclear whether there are universal patterns to music across cultures. Mehr et al. examined ethnographic data and observed music in every society sampled (see the Perspective by Fitch and Popescu). For songs specifically, three dimensions characterize more than 25% of the performances studied: formality of the performance, arousal level, and religiosity. There is more variation in musical behavior within societies than between societies, and societies show similar levels of within-society variation in musical behavior. At the same time, one-third of societies significantly differ from average for any given dimension, and half of all societies differ from average on at least one dimension, indicating variability across cultures.
Science, this issue p. eaax0868; see also p. 944
Structured Abstract
INTRODUCTION
Music is often assumed to be a human universal, emerging from an evolutionary adaptation specific to music and/or a by-product of adaptations for affect, language, motor control, and auditory perception. But universality has never actually been systematically demonstrated, and it is challenged by the vast diversity of music across cultures. Hypotheses of the evolutionary function of music are also untestable without comprehensive and representative data on its forms and behavioral contexts across societies.
RATIONALE
We conducted a natural history of song: a systematic analysis of the features of vocal music found worldwide. It consists of a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of mostly small-scale societies, and a discography of audio recordings of the music itself. We then applied tools of computational social science, which minimize the influence of sampling error and other biases, to answer six questions. Does music appear universally? What kinds of behavior are associated with song, and how do they vary among societies? Are the musical features of a song indicative of its behavioral context (e.g., infant care)? Do the melodic and rhythmic patterns of songs vary systematically, like those patterns found in language? And how prevalent is tonality across musical idioms?
RESULTS
Analysis of the ethnography corpus shows that music appears in every society observed; that variation in song events is well characterized by three dimensions (formality, arousal, religiosity); that musical behavior varies more within societies than across them on these dimensions; and that music is regularly associated with behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. Analysis of the discography corpus shows that identifiable acoustic features of songs (accent, tempo, pitch range, etc.) predict their primary behavioral context (love, healing, etc.); that musical forms vary along two dimensions (melodic and rhythmic complexity); that melodic and rhythmic bigrams fall into power-law distributions; and that tonality is widespread, perhaps universal.
More:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6468/eaax0868
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