Sam Mehr’s daughter was less than a day old when she starred in a video to demonstrate the calming effect of a lullaby, all in support of her dad’s research into the universal language of music.
Since then, more than 5000 people from49 countries have listened to snippets of lullabies and three other song types as part of a study to see if they could intuit the context in which these tunes would have been sung. Participants included native speakers of languages from Arabic to Zulu and most were able to correctly classify each song as either a dance, lullaby, healing or love song, suggesting that musical diversity is indeed built on a foundation of acoustic properties that are accessible across cultures.
Mehr, a cognitive scientist at the University of Auckland, says the study recruited people from industrialised and smaller societies and its multicultural nature was important.
“We went to absurd lengths. We translated the study into 29 languages and we gave [colleagues] ruggedised laptops to get into canoes and go to remote villages where people are not connected to the internet or radio and fairly isolated from the music of other cultures.”
While music evolves differently across cultures, Mehr says the study shows that it seems to be “grounded in universal perceptual phenomena”.
It’s too early to say exactly which cognitive processes allow people with vast cultural differences to recognise the intent of songs recorded in other parts of the world, but Mehr is interested in findings from the field of bioacoustics.
“One animal species will recognise and respond to the alarm calls of another species. They don’t speak the ‘language’ of this other species, but it benefits them to be able to tell when this species is signalling that there’s a predator around.”
Acoustic features associated with specific contexts come up regularly throughout the animal kingdom. “For example, if it’s loud and harsh, it’s probably a hostile vocalisation. And that should provoke some kind of response from you.”
Songs share acoustic properties with these vocalisations and our sensitivity to musical soundscapes is likely built on these kinds of baseline principles. Soft is soothing; harsh and loud is not.
Mehr’s former supervisor, Canadian cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker once sparked controversy by describing music as “auditory cheesecake” and merely a byproduct of evolution. Mehr says it’s difficult to prove a deep evolutionary origin of music, but the growing evidence of its universal nature hints at “deep questions about how our species is built”.
Human song may have evolved as an “honest signal”, says Lidya Yurdum, a collaborator based at the University of Amsterdam. “Human song conveys useful information in ways that are hard to fake. What could it tell us when a group of humans sing and dance together? Maybe that they are highly co-ordinated and that they work well as a team? In this sense, human song is a very reliable signal to other group members (not to mention potential enemies) that the group is able to work as one.”
Of the four song types, love songs were the most difficult to identify, possibly because they are more “acoustically fuzzy”, Yurdum says. “While dance songs have many reliable musical features, like a steady, repetitive tempo, a love song may express fondness, sadness, jealousy or hurt, and all of those songs would likely sound quite different to each other.”
As the next step, the team is expanding the repertoire to include songs used during play, at festivals and in times of mourning. And Mehr says he’s interested in looking more deeply into practical aspects of how singing to infants could help families. He’s already recruited whānau in New Zealand and other countries to participate in a study that tracks changes in babies’ sleep and moods when there’s music in the home.
