Universality and diversity in human song.
other · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 31753969.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/science.aax0868 and PMC identifier 7001657.
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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.
Medical subject headings
- Anthropology, Cultural
- Music
- Singing