Some Thoughts on "Universals" in World Music

McAllester, David P.

doi:10.2307/850637

Cited by 21 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Thus music is present in 100% of a large sample of societies, consistent with the claims of writers and scholars since Longfellow (1,4,5,10,12,53,54,(58)(59)(60)(69)(70)(71)(72)(73). Given these data, and assuming that the sample of human societies is representative, the Bayesian 95% posterior credible interval for the population proportion of human societies that have music, with a uniform prior, is [0.994, 1].…”

Section: Music Appears In All Measured Human Societiessupporting

confidence: 74%

Universality and diversity in human song

Mehr

Singh

Knox

et al. 2019

Science

389

390

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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.

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Section: Music Appears In All Measured Human Societiessupporting

confidence: 74%

Universality and diversity in human song

Mehr

Singh

Knox

et al. 2019

Science

389

390

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Section: Music Appears In All Measured Human Societiessupporting

confidence: 74%

Universality and diversity in human song

Mehr¹,

Singh²,

Knox³

et al. 2018

Preprint

105

174

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One sentence summary: Ethnographic text and audio recordings map out universals and variation in world music. 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, and a discography of audio recordings. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music 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 2 discography, analyzed through machine summaries, amateur and expert listener ratings, and manual transcriptions, revealed 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 melodies and rhythms found worldwide follow power laws. Main Text:At least since Henry Wadsworth Longfellow declared in 1835 that "music is the universal language of mankind" (1) the conventional wisdom among many authors, scholars, and scientists is that music is a human universal, with profound similarities across societies springing from shared features of human psychology (2). On this understanding, musicality is embedded in the biology of Homo sapiens(3), whether as one or more evolutionary adaptations for music (4, 5), the byproducts of adaptations for auditory perception, motor control, language, and affect (6-9), or some amalgam.Music certainly is widespread (10-12), ancient (13), and appealing to almost everyone (14). Yet claims that it is universal or has universal features are commonly made without citation (e.g., (15-17)), and those with the greatest expertise on the topic are skeptical. With a few exceptions (18), most music scholars, particularly ethnomusicologists, suggest there are few if any universals in music (19)(20)(21)(22)(23). They point to variability in the interpretations of a given piece of music (24-26), the importance of natural, political, and economic environments in shaping music (27)(28)(29), the diverse forms of music that can share similar behavioral functions (30), and the methodological difficulty of comparing the music of different societies (12,31,32). Given these criticisms, along with a history of some scholars using comparative work to advance erroneous claims of cultural or racial superiority (33), the common view among music scholars today (34,35) is summarized by the ethnomusicologist George List: "The only universal aspect of music seems to be that most people make it. … I could provide pages of examples of the nonuniversality of music. This is hardly worth the trouble." (36) Are there, in fact, meaningful universals in music? No one doubts that music varies across cultures, but diversity in behavior can shroud regularities emerging from common underlying psychological mechanisms. Beginning with Noam Chomsky's hypothesis that the world's languages 3 ...

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“…McAllester writes: “Any student of man must know that somewhere, someone is doing something that he calls music but nobody else would give it that name. That one exception would be enough to eliminate the possibility of a real universal.” (McAllester, 1971 , 379).…”

Section: Defining Musicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Music and Early Language Acquisition

Brandt¹,

Gebrian²,

Slevc³

2012

Front. Psychology

177

121

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Language is typically viewed as fundamental to human intelligence. Music, while recognized as a human universal, is often treated as an ancillary ability – one dependent on or derivative of language. In contrast, we argue that it is more productive from a developmental perspective to describe spoken language as a special type of music. A review of existing studies presents a compelling case that musical hearing and ability is essential to language acquisition. In addition, we challenge the prevailing view that music cognition matures more slowly than language and is more difficult; instead, we argue that music learning matches the speed and effort of language acquisition. We conclude that music merits a central place in our understanding of human development.

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Some Thoughts on "Universals" in World Music

Cited by 21 publications

References 0 publications

Universality and diversity in human song

Universality and diversity in human song

Universality and diversity in human song

Music and Early Language Acquisition

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