Universality and diversity in human song

Abstract

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 ...

Rhythmic swaying induced by sound in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

“…Music and dance are universal across human culture and have an ancient history (1)(2)(3). Several hypotheses have been suggested to explain the evolutionary origins of music and dance, such as courtship displays (4), group cohesion (5-7), and coalition signaling (8).…”

Cultural evolution of music

“…Note also that there is nothing about progress or direction contained in the above definition: evolution simply refers to changes in the frequencies of heritable variants. These changes can be in the direction of simple to complex-and it is possible that there may be a general trend towards complexity (McShea and Brandon, 2010;Currie and Mace, 2011)-but the reverse is also possible (Allen et al, 2018), as are non-directional changes with little or no functional consequences (Nei et al, 2010).…”

Familiar songs reduce infant distress.

“…Caregivers talk to infants considerably more than they sing to them, but such singing is widespread, probably universal (Mehr et al, 2019). Caregivers' songs are highly stable in pitch level and tempo across occasions, unlike speech to infants, which exhibits considerable variability in form and content (Bergeson & Trehub, 2002).…”