Some songs might speak to your soul,
even if you don't know the words.
The almost magical way that music reflects
and influences our emotions, led the American
poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to declare it
the "universal language of mankind."
But how universal is it, really?
A team of more than a dozen researchers
and countless undergraduates set out to
compile and annotate descriptions and
recordings of musical performances around the world.
Their first finding: music is, indeed universal.
Or at least statistical modeling strongly suggests
that more than 99% of societies have music.
Then, they analyzed the song descriptions
for 60 very different societies:
from the Pawnee in plains of North America,
to the Saami of Scandinavia, a representative sample
that let them test dozens of theories.
They looked at different qualities related to song performance.
As they classified the songs,
they found that three dimensions accounted for more
than a quarter of the variability between songs.
The first was how formal or informal a song was.
Songs high in formality had large audiences and lots of instruments,
often involved ceremonial events, and frequently had
adults only audiences.
Informal events had smaller audiences,
including children, or no audience at all.
Second was how arousing a song was to its listeners.
Lively events involving lots of dancing were high on this
dimension, while a low value reflected a
calmer event, like someone singing to
themselves or a baby.
Last was how religious a song was.
Songs used in ceremonies and funerals were high in religiosity,
while those without a spiritual context scored low.
The researchers applied their findings
to four widespread categories of music:
lullabies, dance songs, love songs, and healing songs,
and found clear trends.
Most dance music was highly arousing and formal,
but low in religiosity.
Lullabies were mostly low formality and low arousal.
And healing song scored high in all dimensions.
While love songs were low in all dimensions.
Even more interesting, the distribution of these
behaviors was similar in all societies studied.
Next, researchers looked at underlying
acoustic features of a song, like tempo and rhythm.
They collected 118 recordings of songs
throughout the world.
They found two factors that explained
a quarter of the variability in songs:
melodic complexity and rhythmic complexity.
Unsurprisingly, dance songs were more rhythmic than
say lullabies, but overall the four categories of songs
couldn't be told apart solely by their melodic or rhythmic complexity.
Scholars say that their database could fuel
future research into even more intriguing questions
about music universals.
And their method might be used to pick out patterns
in other hard to analyze fields,
like storytelling or visual art.
Who knows what other commonalities underlie the
diversity of cultures around the world.