Science article: The World in Song - summarizes new findings about music.
Scientists find that, first, music is universal. It's used in every known human culture. Not only that, but, it's used in similar ways in different cultures. There are lullabies, love songs, healing songs, dance songs. Not only that, but all these types of songs have similar musical features. Some of which you'd figure (dance songs are faster) some you wouldn't (ritual healing songs are "less melodically variable" than dance songs).
Musics seem wildly different across cultures - across some remote cultures, you can barely identify it as music. But the approach they used (Bayesian analysis) was able to find relationships we can't easily find. So, science confirms it, music is deeply built into humanity - may even be something we evolved.
(now I'll quote from the article just for fun)
Quote:
|
Additionally, the authors found that the principle of tonality (building melodies from a small set of related notes, built upon a base tonic or "home" pitch) exists in all cultures. This suggests the existence of a universal cognitive bias to generate melodies based on categorical building blocks.
|
Not gonna lie, I understood the first sentence (and I'm proud) but not the second one.