Tomorrow an elaborate study addressing this question will be published in Science (Mehr et al., 2019). It consists of 17 pages main text and roughly 100 pages of supplementary materials. It will give all of us a lot to read and think about. (Although the Science paper is embargoed until tomorrow afternoon, in Amsterdam we discussed the paper this week based on the pre-publication made available through PsyArXiv.)
(Source: pre-publication)
The study (i.e. pre-publication) presents several interesting findings, some as expected, others very intriguing. First of all, it provides convincing evidence that music is indeed a universal phenomenon: it can be found in virtually all societies and varies more within than between societies. Secondly, the study shows that there are often clear relations between the form of the music (its musical structure) and its function – the context in which it is used. For instance, being a lullaby or healing song. And, even more interesting, “these patterns do not consist of concrete acoustic features, such as a specific melody or rhythm, but rather of relational properties such as accent, meter, and interval structure.” (Mehr et al., 2019, p.13). Clearly, universal features of human musicality (i.e. the capacity for music; Honing et al., 2015) lead people to produce and enjoy songs with certain kinds of rhythmic or melodic patterning that naturally go with certain moods.
P.S. Many media will cover the publication in the next few days. For a coverage in Dutch see, e.g. De Volkskrant and NRC.
Honing, H., ten Cate, C., Peretz, I., & Trehub, S. E. (2015). Without it no music: cognition, biology and evolution of musicality. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 370(1664), 20140088. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0088
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