Universality and diversity in human song

Bibliographic Data

ID8079109
AuthorsSamuel A Mehr (0000-0002-9400-7718, Harvard University), Manvir Singh (0000-0002-6026-947X, Harvard University Press), Dean Knox (Princeton University), Daniel Ketter (0000-0002-6133-9441, Missouri State University), Daniel Pickens-Jones (0000-0002-7887-1872, Oregon Medical Research Center), Atwood (0000-0003-2889-9575, Harvard University), Christopher Lucas, Christopher J Lucas (0000-0002-5339-9655, Washington University in St. Louis), Nori Jacoby (0000-0003-2868-0100, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics), Alena Egner (University of California, Los Angeles), Erin J Hopkins (0000-0001-5355-4080, Harvard University), Rhea M Howard (Harvard University), Joshua K Hartshorne (0000-0003-1240-3598, Boston College), Mariela Jennings (Boston College), Jan Simson (0000-0002-9406-7761, Harvard University), Constance M Bainbridge (0000-0003-3960-2845, Harvard University), Constance Bainbridge, Steven Pinker (0000-0002-2319-4085, Harvard University), Timothy J O’donnell (0000-0003-0291-8838, McGill University), Timothy J O'Donnell (0000-0002-5711-977X), Max M Krasnow (0000-0001-9216-9302, Harvard University), Luke Glowacki (0000-0002-8314-5904, Pennsylvania State University)
Year2018
Publication date2018-11-21
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypePREPRINT
PublisherCenter for Open Science (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.31234/osf.io/emq8r
OpenAlexW4256421013
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited24

What is universal about music across human societies, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world’s societies and a discography of audio recordings of the music itself. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music appears in every society observed; that variation in musical behavior is well-characterized by three dimensions, which capture the formality, arousal, and religiosity of song events; that musical behavior varies more within societies than across societies on these dimensions; and that music is regularly associated with behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography, analyzed through four representations (machine summaries, listener ratings, expert annotations, expert transcriptions), revealed that identifiable acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral function worldwide, and that these features fall along two dimensions, melodic and rhythmic complexity. These analyses show how applying the tools of computational social science to rich bodies of humanistic data can reveal both universal features and patterns of variability in culture, addressing longstanding debates about each

Art · Dance · Ethnography · Ethnomusicology · Formality · Linguistics · Melody · Musical · Popular music · Sociology · Variation (astronomy · Visual arts · Anthropology · Diverse Musicological Studies · Neuroscience and Music Perception · Psychology · Social and Cultural Dynamics

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