The natural history of song – a human universal

A new preprint uses the Human Area Relation Files (an ethnographic database) to statistically analyze patterns in songs across many societies, A natural history of song:

What is universal about music across human societies, and what varies? 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.

Source: www.gnxp.com