Songs that share a social function may take a similar form because those musical features help amplify the music’s social signal, Mehr writes in Current Biology. Errors also appeared to happen nonrandomly – when participants identified a healing or love song as having a different function, for example, it was often because the song possessed features typical of another genre, or the genre was less distinct in general. Participants rated the same set of dance songs and lullabies as having the most unique musical profiles dance songs’ more numerous singers, instruments, and greater complexity were easily distinguished from the simpler and often female-led style of lullabies. In a follow-up study of 1,000 participants, half of whom lived in India and half of whom lived in the United States, Mehr and colleagues found that while all four song types showed reliable differences in their musical features, some were more distinct than others. Highland Scots Love Music - Outer Hebrides, Scotland Iroquois Healing Music - Six Nations Reserve, Ontario, Canada ![]() ![]() Mentawai Dance Music – Mentawai Archipelago, Indonesia Samples of the musical genres used in the Natural History of Song study. Participants rated dance songs highly on the dimension “used for dancing,” lullabies highly on the dimension “used to soothe a baby,” and healing songs highly on the dimension “used to heal illness.” They weren’t able to do so for love songs, however. Participants, who were completely unfamiliar with the societies from which these songs originated, rated their perceptions of the songs’ functions - and their ratings correlated highly with what the songs were actually used for in the societies from which they were gathered. The excerpts were drawn from a larger set of 118 songs in 75 languages from 86 small-scale hunter-gatherer, pastoral, and subsistence-farming societies. In an online study with 750 participants from 60 countries, listeners rated the perceived purpose of a random sampling of 36 song excerpts from the Natural History of Song archives. The universality of these patterns means that people are often able to identify the intended purpose of songs from cultures they may otherwise have little or no experience with. “In our data, no culture produces only very formal songs and no informal songs, or only very religious songs and no secular songs, so what that suggests is that not only is music universal in a trivial sense in that it turns up everywhere, but there seem to be key ways that music is patterned similarly across human societies,” Mehr explains. This tells us something about the basic types of music that exist across cultures, he said, and although the evidence is mixed for every culture producing every type of music, there is always a certain amount of musical variety within a culture. These dimensional labels, Mehr continues, create intuitive clusters of songs that align with the most common genres of music, including songs traditionally accompanied by dancing, ceremonial healing songs, love songs, lullabies, and spiritual or religious music. Through analyzing the lab’s Natural History of Song database, an archive of nearly 5,000 songs and performances from more than 100 societies across the globe, Mehr and his team have been able to distill the musical complexities of a given song into a few key dimensions, such as level of formality, religious/secular purpose, and positive/negative affect. What’s far more interesting is how music is universal, says psychological scientist Samuel Mehr, principal investigator at Harvard University’s Music Lab. It may seem almost trivial to say that music is universal every known culture in the world seems to have something that ethnographers and ethnomusicologists would describe as music. It can awe a concert hall full of adoring fans, woo a would-be lover, or soothe a fussing child - and psychological scientists are discovering just how deep our connection with this intimate art form goes.
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