Musical universals: people can identify lullabies and dance songs from other cultures

By Emma Young No matter where they live, people interpret certain kinds of vocalisations, even from animals, as conveying a particular emotion – as “angry”, for instance, or “soothing”. It’s tempting to think that there might be similar cross-cultural universals in the ways that we use music – that a song used to calm an infant in Melanesia, say, should bear striking similarities to a song created for the same purpose by a culture in the Arctic Circle. Well, it’s tempting if you’re a cognitive scientist – though not if you’re an ethnomusicologist (who studies music from different cultures), according to a survey of the opinions of academics reported in a new paper, published in Current Biology. “Historically, the idea that there might be universals in music from many cultures has been met with considerable scepticism, especially among music scholars,” note the authors of the study, led by Samuel Mehr at Harvard University, which then goes on to explore whether they do exist. The team recruited 750 online participants from 60 countries. They listened to a random sample of 36 excerpts of songs taken from the Natural History of Song discography, which includes vocal music from 86 predominantly small-scale societies – such as love songs from the Fulani society of pastoralists from Western Africa, lullabies from Igluik Inuit hunger-gatherers from the Arctic Circle, and dance songs by a society of horticulturalists from Melanesia. “Th...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cross-cultural Music Source Type: blogs