Universality and diversity in human song

What is universal about music, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world's societies, as well as a discography of audio recordings. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music (including songs with words) appears in every society observed; that music varies along three dimensions (formality, arousal, religiosity), more within societies than across them; and that music is associated with certain behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography-analyzed through machine summaries, amateur and expert listener ratings, and manual transcriptions-reveals that acoustic features of songs predict their primary…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• MR
  Microsoft Research
• HU
  Harvard University
• WU
  Washington University in St. Louis
• FD
  Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture
• HG
  Harvard Graduate School of Education
• HD
  Harvard Data Science Initiative, Harvard University
• NS
  Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
• NO
  NIH Office of the Director

  Award: DP5OD024566