Music can take on many forms in cultures across the globe, but Yale researchers have found in a new study that some themes are universally recognizable by people everywhere with one notable exception—love songs.
“All around the world, people sing in similar ways,” said senior author Samuel Mehr, who splits his time between the Yale Child Study Center, where he is an assistant professor adjunct, and the University of Auckland, where he is senior lecturer in psychology. “Music is deeply rooted in human social interaction.”
For the new study, published Sept. 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Yale researchers played 14-second snippets of vocals from a bank of songs that originated from a host of cultures to more than 5,000 people from 49 countries. The research team included subjects not only from the industrialized world, but more than 100 individuals who live in three small, relatively isolated groups of no more than 100.
They then asked the listeners to rank the likelihood of each sample as being one of four music types: dance, lullabies, “healing” music, or love music.
Unlike most psychology experiments, which are conducted in one language, this experiment was performed in 31 languages. Yet regardless of the language used in the survey, people from all cultures could easily identify dance music, lullabies, and, to a lesser extent, even music created to heal. Recognition of what the researchers identified as love songs, however, lagged these other categories.
2023-09-07 16:00:03
Original from phys.org