Title
Universality and diversity in human song
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.
Department(s)
Music
Document Type
Article
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aax0868
Publication Date
1-1-2019
Recommended Citation
Mehr, Samuel A., Manvir Singh, Dean Knox, Daniel M. Ketter, Daniel Pickens-Jones, Stephanie Atwood, Christopher Lucas et al. "Universality and diversity in human song." Science 366, no. 6468 (2019).
Journal Title
Science