Media release

From: PNAS

Some basic aspects of musical interpretation appear to be universal and grounded in globally shared perceptual principles, a study finds. Vocal music is a human universal characterized by rich variability within and across cultures. However, some behavioral contexts in which songs are used are similar around the globe. Lidya Yurdum, Samuel Mehr, and colleagues tested the prediction that the behavioral contexts of songs are mutually intelligible to listeners across cultures. The study participants included 5,516 native speakers of 28 languages in Internet-connected industrialized societies and 116 native speakers of three non-English languages in small-scale societies with limited access to global media. The participants heard songs recorded in many different societies and reported their intuitions about the original behavioral context of each song. Listeners across societies reliably inferred the contexts of dance songs, lullabies, and healing songs but not love songs. In general, the results revealed that listeners’ inferences about the behavioral contexts of unfamiliar, foreign songs are accurate, similar to one another, and relatively uninfluenced by cultural proximity. The findings suggest that certain basic types of songs occur universally across human societies. Such songs share characteristic musical features, which allow them to be mutually intelligible across cultural boundaries, according to the authors.