Singing researchers discover cross-cultural patterns in music and language

Are the acoustic features of music and spoken language shared across cultures? Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen are contributing to global research on music and speech. scientific progress.

An international team of researchers recorded themselves playing traditional music and speaking in their native language. In all 50+ languages, the rhythm of songs and instrumental melodies was slower than spoken language, and the pitch was higher and more stable.

Language and music may share evolutionary functions. Both spoken words and songs have characteristics such as rhythm and pitch. But are the similarities and differences between speech and song shared across cultures?

To investigate this question, 75 researchers speaking 55 languages ​​from Asia, Africa, the Americas, Europe, and the Pacific were assembled. They included experts in ethnomusicology, music psychology, linguistics, and evolutionary biology. The researchers were asked to sing, play instrumental music, recite the lyrics, and verbally describe the songs. The resulting audio samples were analyzed for characteristics such as pitch, timbre, and rhythm.

Senior author Patrick Savage, a psychologist and musicologist from the University of Auckland’s Waipapa Taumata Rau who sang Scarborough Fair, said the study provided “strong evidence of cross-cultural regularities”. Says.

Limor Raviv of MPI, a co-author of the study, recorded the Hebrew song “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav.” Fellow MPI writer Andrea Lavignani played the saxophone and recorded the Italian song “Bella Ciao.” This collection also includes the Dutch songs “Hoor de Wind waait” and “Dikkertje Dap”.

Savage speculates on the underlying reason for the cross-cultural similarities, suggesting that songs are predictably more regular than speech because they are used to promote synchronization and social bonds. .

“The slow, regular, predictable melody makes it easy to sing together in large groups,” he says. “We are trying to shed light on the cultural and biological evolution of his two systems that make us human: music and language.”