Culture: Music is universal - unless it's about love
All over the world, people have the same definitions of what constitutes a dance song or a lullaby. But love songs seem to differ from other types of music in this respect.
Music is inherent to every human culture and comes in many guises: from accompanying ceremonial group dances to lullabies. Despite the great diversity, there are striking similarities worldwide. For example, all people sing calm and melodic songs to soothe babies and move to loud and rhythmic dance music. This suggests that basic musical characteristics are understood regardless of language or culture. Many previous studies on the topic were limited to English speakers from the Western world, so were not representative of humanity. A team led by Lidya Yurdum from Yale University in New Haven has now closed this gap. Their results were published in the scientific journal "PNAS".
More than 5,000 volunteers from 49 countries took part in the study. The majority of them came from industrialised societies, but 116 people came from more isolated communities with limited access to global media. The participants listened to randomly selected songs from a representative sample. They were asked to rate the likelihood that each sample was one of four types of music: Dance music, lullabies, healing music or love songs.
Regardless of language, people from all cultures recognised dance music and lullabies most reliably - and to a lesser extent music composed for "healing". Greater linguistic or geographical proximity between listeners and performers increased the hit rate only slightly. According to the authors, the worldwide musical diversity is therefore based on universal psychological phenomena.
In contrast, only 12 out of 28 language groups were able to recognise love songs. This could be due to the wide emotional range and the influence of linguistic and cultural characteristics. "This is a particularly blurred category. It includes songs that express happiness and attraction, but also sadness and jealousy," says Yurdum.
Spectrum of Science
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