Statistical universals reveal the structures and functions of human music Journal Articles

abstract

• SignificanceWhich features of music are universal and which are culture-specific? Why? These questions are important for understanding why humans make music but have rarely been scientifically tested. We used musical classification techniques and statistical tools to analyze a global set of 304 music recordings, finding no absolute universals but dozens of statistical universals. These include not only commonly cited features related to pitch and rhythm but also domains such as social context and interrelationships between musical features. We speculate that group coordination is the common aspect unifying the cross-cultural structural regularities of human music, with implications for the study of music evolution.

authors

• Savage, Patrick E
• Brown, Steven
• Sakai, Emi
• Currie, Thomas E

status

• published 

publication date

• July 21, 2015

has subject area

• Databases as Topic (MeSH)
• Geography (MeSH)
• Humans (MeSH)
• Language (MeSH)
• Likelihood Functions (MeSH)
• Models, Theoretical (MeSH)
• Music (MeSH)
• Phylogeny (MeSH)
• Statistics as Topic (MeSH)

published in

• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America  Journal

keywords

• Databases as Topic
• Geography
• Humans
• Language
• Likelihood Functions
• Models, Theoretical
• Music
• Phylogeny
• Statistics as Topic
• cross-cultural universals
• cultural phylogenetics
• ethnomusicology
• evolution
• group coordination

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

• 10.1073/pnas.1414495112

start page

• 8987

end page

• 8992

volume

• 112

issue

• 29