
Music is universal and used in strikingly similar ways across the globe: study - dr_dshiv
https://www.newsweek.com/scientists-music-universal-globe-1473230
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hesk
My pet theory is that music is so universal because it hijacks two systems in
the human brain that are necessary for survival.

First, humans are a social species and use language to communicate. Babies
learn language by observing and emulating their parents. So it makes sense
that humans evolved a rewards pathway that makes it pleasurable to listen to
sounds.

Second, the brain is basically a pattern matching and prediction machine.
Music is full of patterns, e.g., rhythm and harmonics.

That's why music is so popular -- because it allows the brain to do something
which it is very good at and which it also finds pleasurable.

~~~
pygy_
My pet theory (which complements yours) is that it was, before the invention
of writing, part of the mnemonic techniques used to perpetuate vital
information. Other worthy mentions are story-telling/acting, poetry (rhyme and
meter) and painting.

Being innately predisposed to like these disciplines makes one more likely to
practice them, become good at them, and help propagate useful info undamaged,
thus rising the group's survival abilities.

They were vital for so long (compared to the few millennia since we invented
writing) that we still have the taste baked in, even though writing, then the
press then computers and photographs took over those roles.

Rhymes and meter are the CRC32 check of prehistory.

~~~
nitwit005
I wouldn't assume it's a positive trait. People take pleasure out of things
like optical illusions, which are arguably defects in human vision.

There is a 3-5% rate of people who don't enjoy music, and it at least doesn't
obviously handicap them:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_anhedonia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_anhedonia)

~~~
pygy_
It doesn't handicap them today. I think it would have handicapped them 4000
years ago.

There is actual evidence for my theory BTW. Aboriginal folks in Australia had
a tradition of using songs to describe itineraries.

Antique poetry and the bits of oral traditions that survived until today were
using heavily structured verses (like the dactylic hexameter). A notable
exception is the old testament, whose first parts were transmitted orally
before being written down, and which is structured in verses of unknown
structure (or unstructured, except for the psalms).

Modern poetry has gradually lost that strong structure. The prevalence of
musical anhedonia and amusia may very well have risen in recent times as a
result of the loss of utility of music.

————

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusia)

~~~
nitwit005
Possibly, but it'd be a fairly minor handicap. Remember that people who don't
enjoy music have no problem learning music or instruments, and plenty do.
There's no obvious way it would result in your death.

We tend to make the mistake of assuming any seeming oddities of the human must
somehow be due to evolution. But when we see the same in the rest of the body
we often make the opposite assumption and assume it's a vestigial trait, or a
coincidence.

~~~
pygy_
My point is that taste in music is vestigial since the invention of writing.
Before that it was a selective advantage.

Even if amusia (of which musical anhedonia is a subtype) was prevalent at the
time, culture transmission operates at the group level. The mere existance of
amusia with such a low prevalence doesn't invalidate my point.

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username90
People often say things like "This culture doesn't have a word for that color,
how strange is that?", but isn't it stranger that basically every culture has
so many similarities, like words for the same very abstract things like love,
marriage, colors, emotions and so on? Especially if you look at the typical
persons of societies instead of the upper classes. I believe many greatly
underestimate how much our culture is rooted in our genes, I see no other
reason why human societies has so much in common.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
“Mama” and “papa” are interesting words, because some variation on those, with
the same meaning, exist in almost every language. Does this mean every
language borrowed them from some common ancestor?

No, not quite. It's just that newborn children make babbling sounds that
resemble speech, with a very limited range of “consonsants”, and humans are
such narcissists that they assume those babblings refer to them, the parents
:)

~~~
pntnp
> and humans are such narcissists that they assume those babblings refer to
> them, the parents :)

Or mama, papa, appa, amma, etc are the easiest words for infants/toddlers to
pronounce and hence we used these word for children to call attention to the
two most important people for their survival?

Is it narcissism or the fact that infants/toddlers cannot even pronounce most
vowels/consonants other than a, m, b/p?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
You're assigning meaning onto young infants' babblings that isn't there.
They're not words.

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mrlala
I took a music class in university in which the entire focus of the class is
that music is NOT universal.

This was a while back so details I remember are sparse.. but he had tons of
examples from around the world where what we might consider "happy" or "sad"
was entirely different in many cultures.

Granted, it's probably still more true than not to say "for the most part
music is universal", I don't think it holds as a simple factual statement.

~~~
Gene_Parmesan
I think this study refers more to the _ways_ music is used in societies
throughout our species -- e.g., songs for grieving, praying, marriage, love,
etc. -- moreso than the specifics of the structure of the music in and of
itself. The statement "music is universal" does not mean "all music shares the
same mapping between tones and emotions," but instead simply that the use of
music has similar functions throughout the globe.

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fidla
At Hampshire College, I studied ethnomusicology and did a thesis called
Universal's in Music, coming to the same conclusion. This was 1983.

~~~
Simon_says
Universal’s what?

~~~
Kye
I think they made a typo and meant Universals as in ubiquitous features of
music across cultures.

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atoav
My theory is that this is due to the natural series of harmonics — sound tells
you a ton about any physical object that emits it — so any oranism that lives
in a sound transmitting medium profits from interpreting it and dividing it
into different emotional responses. This is why a deep bass hit can feel
dangerous, or exciting while a scraping metal sound can feel plainly _wrong_ ,
because there is no harmony at all and this isn’t how anything is meant to
sound at all.

So depending on what is dangerous or useful to a species it should develop
different preferences.

~~~
dr_dshiv
Also, more harmonics, more efficient sound production. And human voices are
very harmonical. Sexual selection is likely responsible for that.

What I find strange, though, is why animals don't appreciate music (or almost
never). You can't even train pigeons, nice or apes to tap to the beat.

~~~
Jamwinner
Consiciousness. I know its in vouge to pretend animals are all reasoning
creatures, but alas the world is, thankfully, not disney. Our ability to
relate 'Now', with our perception of stimulus moments ago, is how we percieve
music. This is mostly absent in animals, or has a vastly different temporal
range. Even pure tones are just cycles per second.

That said, if you ignore the meter, most animals seem to react to various
harmonic and aharmonic sounds. Dogs howling, birds whistling, etc. The timings
seem quite specific to the creature, and their adapted envirnment.

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ken
I can't tell what exactly they mean by "strikingly similar". The only concrete
similarity I see mentioned is that "tonality is used".

This sounds like the Joseph Campbell school of finding similarities. If you
squint hard enough, everything looks the same.

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_red
Not really. Western music is driven by harmonic progression, which is largely
absent in most other cultures. The lack of "chord changes" is why its so easy
to discern western vs eastern music.

~~~
anigbrowl
Equal temperament is a relatively recent (hundreds of years) development in
Western civilization and arguably originated in China.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament#History)

Harmonic progression is a staple of Western classical and pop styles, but most
folk music is diatonic (confined to a single scale), not least because of the
limitations of wind instruments. Diatonic music and harmony has seen a major
resurgence with the advent of electronic dance music, which subordinates
harmonic progression to rhythmic and timbral development so as to stay 'in the
groove' by maintaining a particular musical mood.

~~~
dr_dshiv
My reading of the Wikipedia is that equal temperament didn't originate in
China (though it may have slightly predated the occurrance in the west).
Rather, it was a synchronicity -- it occurred at the same time in the west
(1584 and 1585), like Leibniz and Newton coinventing calculus independently or
Darwin and Wallace inventing survival of the fittest.

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justanothersys
I highly recommend "Noise: The Political Economy of Music" \-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise:_The_Political_Economy_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise:_The_Political_Economy_of_Music)

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dr_dshiv
They found common functions for music around the world: love songs, lullabies,
dance music and.... Sound healing? Wow, that's an interesting perspective.

Their methods were great, in showing that the functional intent of music could
be reliably determined by people around the world.

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dr_dshiv
Music is strikingly tonal, cross culturally. There are different scales, but
tonality is universal (across cultures, although cultures can have non tonal
songs), likely due to the biological-physical nature of harmony.

~~~
laretluval
Scales are universal, but the distinction between harmony and dissonance is
not.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27409816](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27409816)

~~~
dr_dshiv
Yeah, I'm skeptical of that paper and it is extremely difficult to disprove,
because access to that population is so restricted.

The way I'd test it would be presenting a set of 2 tones and giving them
control over a third. like 200hz +300hz and then letting them move a slider
between 325-425hz. Where do they find the resulting sound most pleasant and
where most unpleasant?

The sensation of dissonance is so strong and visceral, it is extremely hard to
believe it has no universality to it.

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dang
We changed the URL from
[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6468/eaax0868](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6468/eaax0868)
to what appears to be the leading popular article on the topic.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22popular%20article%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

~~~
dr_dshiv
Oh, thanks for linking in the original article. It has excellent illustrations
and unfortunately the DOI link in the Newsweek article is non-functional.

I wish that press coverage of science could at least post a proper academic
reference at the end.

