Music has become a huge part of people’s lives, from love songs to dance songs. According to a study, music made cultures from all around the globe show some universal patterns.
The study was published on Thursday, and it focuses on musical recordings and ethnographic records from around 60 societies from all around the world, including cultures from the Highland Scots in Scotland, the Mentawai rain forest in Indonesia, Nyangatom nomads in Ethiopia and hunter-gatherers in Australia.
They found that music was associated with dance, love, healing, weddings and funerals, infant care, religious rituals, and processions.
Researchers found strong similarities in musical features from across various cultures. This comes from Samuel Mehr from Harvard University, who is the lead author of the study. It was published in the journal Science.
Music Universal Patterns And Cultural Influences Revealed In A New Study
The study believes that there is this idea that there are some sets of governing rules for human minds and how they produce music all around the world. But we cannot test it unless we have enough data about music from enough cultures.
Professor Luke Glowacki from Penn State University stated that ethnomusicologists believed that there are some features in a piece of music that are influenced by the culture from where the music is coming from. But they found something very different.
The music was not being shaped by the culture itself but from the social function of the music, which has a stronger influence on the features.
Dance songs have a certain sound because they have a certain function. The same goes for lullabies. If music were entirely shaped by culture and not by human psychology, then these similarities would not emerge in extremely diverse cultures.
