Music Is A Universal Language To All Humans – Study Reveals

Cynthia McKanzie – MessageToEagle.com – There are many scientifically proven benefits of listening to music.

Playing a musical instrument or listening to music can have a positive effect on the brain, our health, and fitness. Scientists have for long theorized that there is a connection between IQ and musical ability and suggested the two were correlated. It was thought that participation in musical training could improve IQ.

Music memory

Studies revealed musical training lead to improvements in a wide variety of different skills, including memory and spatial learning for example. In addition, language skills such as verbal memory, literacy, and verbal intelligence have been shown to strongly benefit from musical training.

Nearly 200 years ago, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow asserted “Music is the universal language of mankind.” Now a group of researchers from Harvard University decided to find out if the American poet’s words were mere cliché, or cultural truism.

Could Music Be A Universal Language All Humans Understand?

The goal of the study was to answer big questions: Is music a cultural universal? If it is, which musical qualities overlap across disparate societies? If it isn’t, why does it seem so ubiquitous?

To answer these questions, they needed a dataset of unprecedented breadth and depth. Over a five-year period, the Harvard team hunted down hundreds of recordings in libraries and private collections of scientists half a world away.

See also:

Pirahã: Weird Language That Lacks Words For Numbers And Colors

Silbo Gomero: Whistling Language Used On The Canary Islands

Kuuk Thaayorre Language Uses Cardinal-Direction To Define Space

Their questions were so compelling that the project rapidly grew into a major, international collaboration with musicians, data scientists, psychologists, linguists, and political scientists.

The team looked at every society for which there was ethnographic information in a large online database, 315 in all, and found mention of music in all of them.

For their own ethnographic portion, they collected around 5,000 descriptions of a song from a subset of 60 cultures spanning 30 distinct geographic regions. For the discography, they collected 118 songs from a total of 86 cultures, again covering 30 geographic regions.

Music Is A Universal Language All Humans Understand

“Music is universal”, scientists say. Credit: Public Domain

The results of this comprehensive study showed that across societies, music is associated with behaviors such as infant care, healing, dance, and love (among many others, like mourning, warfare, processions, and ritual) and that these behaviors are not terribly different from society to society. Examining lullabies, healing songs, dance songs, and love songs in particular, they discovered that songs that share behavioral functions tend to have similar musical features.

“Lullabies and dance songs are ubiquitous and they are also highly stereotyped,” Manvir Singh, a graduate student in Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology said.

“For me, dance songs and lullabies tend to define the space of what music can be. They do very different things with features that are almost the opposite of each other.”

Singh also remarked that for or him, the profound patterns of music demonstrate that human culture everywhere is built from common psychological building blocks.

The next step in this study is to see whether it’s possible to unlock the governing rules of “musical grammar.”

That idea has been percolating among music theorists, linguists, and psychologists of music for decades, but had never been demonstrated across cultures.

“In music theory, tonality is often assumed to be an invention of Western music, but our data raise the controversial possibility that this could be a universal feature of music,” Mehr said.

“That raises pressing questions about structure that underlies music everywhere — and whether and how our minds are designed to make music.”

Written by Cynthia McKanzie – MessageToEagle.com Staff Writer