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Statistical universals reveal the structures and functions of human music
Abstract
Significance: Which features of music are universal and which are culture-specific? Why? These questions are important for understanding why humans make music but have rarely been scientifically tested. We used musical classification techniques and statistical tools to analyze a global set of 304 music recordings, finding no absolute universals but dozens of statistical universals. These include not only commonly cited features related to pitch and rhythm but also domains such as social context and interrelationships between musical features. We speculate that group coordination is the common aspect unifying the cross-cultural structural regularities of human music, with implications for the study of music evolution.
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“In the middle of the continuum is the most interactive function of songs with words, where language and music most universally come together (Savage et al., 2015).”
From A Joint Prosodic Origin of Language and Music (2017) · cites this paper as Savage et al., 2015
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Metadata
- Authors
- Savage, P. E., Brown, S., Sakai, E., & Currie, T. E.
- Affiliations
- Department of Musicology, Tokyo University of the Arts, 110-8714 Tokyo, Japan;
- Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada L8S 4K1;
- Centre for Ecology & Conservation, College of Life & Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Penryn Campus, Cornwall TR10 9FE, United Kingdom
- ORCID
- Savage, Patrick E.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2015-06-29
- Volume
- 112
- Issue
- 29
- Pages
- 8987-8992
- ISSN
- 0027-8424
- 1091-6490
- Cited by
- 440
- References
- 84
- Language
- en
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