Page 17 - Info Magazine nr 17 april may 2021

Universal features of music around the implications. “Human musicality fundamen-
world tally rests on a small number of fixed pillars:
hard-coded predispositions, afforded to us by
the ancient physiological infrastructure of our
Date:
November 22, 2019 shared biology. These ‘musical pillars’ are then
Source: ‘seasoned’ with the specifics of every individual
University of Vienna culture, giving rise to the beautiful kaleidosco-
Summary: pic assortment that we find in world music,” Tu-
New research supports the idea that music all dor Popescu explains.
around the globe shares important commonali-
ties, despite many differences. “This new research revives a fascinating field
of study, pioneered by Carl Stumpf in Berlin at
Is music really a "universal language"? Two ar- the beginning of the 20th century, but that was
ticles in the most recent issue of Science sup- tragically terminated by the Nazis in the 1930s,”
port the idea that music all around the globe Fitch adds.
shares important commonalities, despite many
differences. Researchers led by Samuel Mehr As humanity comes closer together, so does our
at Harvard University have undertaken a lar- wish to understand what it is that we all have
ge-scale analysis of music from cultures around in common -- in all aspects of behaviour and
the world. Cognitive biologists Tecumseh Fitch culture. The new research suggests that human
and Tudor Popescu of the University of Vienna musicality is one of these shared aspects of
suggest that human musicality unites all cultu- human cognition. “Just as European countries
res across the planet. The many musical styles are said to be ‘United In Diversity’, so too the
of the world are so different, at least superfi- medley of human musicality unites all cultures
cially, that music scholars are often sceptical across the planet,” concludes Tudor Popescu.
that they have any important shared features.
“Universality is a big word -- and a dangerous
one,” the great Leonard Bernstein once said. In-
deed, in ethnomusicology, universality became
something of a dirty word. But new research
promises to once again revive the search for
deep universal aspects of human musicality.

Samuel Mehr at Harvard University found that
all cultures studied make music, and use simi-
lar kinds of music in similar contexts, with con-
sistent features in each case. For example, dan-
ce music is fast and rhythmic, and lullabies soft
and slow -- all around the world. Furthermore,
all cultures showed tonality: building up a small
subset of notes from some base note, just as in
the Western diatonic scale. Healing songs tend
to use fewer notes, and more closely spaced,
than love songs. These and other findings indi-
cate that there are indeed universal properties
of music that likely reflect deeper commonali-
ties of human cognition -- a fundamental “hu-
man musicality.”

In a Science perspective piece in the same is-
sue, University of Vienna researchers Tecum-
seh Fitch and Tudor Popescu comment on the