MUSIC IS HUMANITY’S UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE, STUDY SHOWS

I started taking music lessons when I was seven. I also sang in choirs throughout my youth, and even today, I enjoy writing songs, singing and playing guitar.

As an adult, I studied popular songwriting at the Royal Conservatory of Music. I can honestly say that music has been central throughout my life.

One of my music teachers, Marie Ryan, often told us that “music is the universal language.” That always rang true with me, and I’ve found that music has brought me together with people, both here at home and on all my travels.

“MUSIC IS THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE”

Dr. Samuel Mehr has been studying human development and psychology for the past six years. He was recognized as a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science.

Professor Mehr studies the psychology of listening, sound and music. He founded The Music Lab, which is a research platform where everyday people can participate in musical experiments.

He’s currently an assistant professor adjunct at the Yale Child Study Center. He’s also a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland.

PEOPLE EVERYWHERE RESPOND IN THE SAME WAY

This week, the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a new study of which Professor Mehr is the senior author. The study found that music is indeed a universal language in the sense that it has themes to which people everywhere respond in the same way.

“All around the world, people sing in similar ways,” Professor Mehr explains. “Music is deeply rooted in human social interaction.”

Professor Mehr and his team conducted a study involving 5,000 people from 49 countries speaking 31 languages. The subjects included people from the industrialized world, but also more than 100 people living in isolated communities of less than 100 members.

STUDY INVOLVING 5,000 PEOPLE FROM 49 COUNTRIES

The researchers played each participant a series of 14-second musical clips. The team drew the clips from the 118 songs in the Natural History of Song Discography, which contains songs from all over the world, representing 86 societies and 75 languages.

Then, the scientists asked subjects to categorize each of the clips as a dance song, a lullaby, a healing song, or a love song. They discovered that most people from their diverse sample could easily identify whether a song fell into the dance, lullaby, or healing genres.

All language groups correctly identified lullabies and 96% recognized dance songs. The groups could distinguish healing songs 71% of the time.

ALL RECOGNIZED LULLABIES, DANCE AND HEALING SONGS

On the other hand, only 43% of the groups correctly identified love songs. It’s not clear why love songs were harder to recognize, but the researchers have some ideas.

“One reason for this could be that love songs may be a particularly fuzzy category that includes songs that express happiness and attraction, but also sadness and jealousy,” Lidya Yurdum, the study’s lead author speculates. “Listeners who heard love songs from neighboring countries and in languages related to their own actually did a little better, likely because of the familiar linguistic and cultural clues.”

I find this especially interesting because, at least in Western popular music, almost all songs are about love, relationships, or sex. There are other themes, including music itself, dancing, social justice, identity, and alienation, but love songs seem to be the universal language on every music playlist.

‘PREVALENCE OF LOVE SONGS PRESENTS A PUZZLE’

The researchers touch on this in their paper. “The widespread prevalence of love songs in modern popular music presents a puzzle, given this context, of potential interest to music researchers.”

My uninformed conjecture on this puzzle would be that songwriters express romantic themes through their lyrics rather than the rhythm or the melody. Love songs can be upbeat or downbeat, happy or sad in terms of their general sound.

The fact that people were better at spotting love songs from nearby cultures and languages suggests to me that listeners identify these themes from lyrics. Besides, romantic love entails a wide range of more primal emotions, as Ms. Yurdum pointed out.

FREE-RESPONSE DATA AND FULL RANGE OF INTERPRETATIONS

This relates to a limitation that the researchers themselves recognize with the study. As they explain in their paper, “The collection of free-response data (i.e., asking participants to generate their own list of behavioural contexts for a song, rather than choosing from pre-specified options) would enable participants to express the full range of culture-specific interpretations of song.”

In other words, it might have worked better to let subjects use any word they liked to describe a song instead of pigeonholing them into fixed categories. That way, a “boy meets girl” song wouldn’t have to be lumped in with a “somebody done somebody wrong song.”

ALL CULTURES RECOGNIZE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE OF SONG

So, why can people from completely different cultures understand the universal language of song? Beyond that, what would cause singing to evolve to begin with?

The scientists believe that “music evolved as a vocal signal in these specific contexts. Music appears to function as a credible signal in a similar fashion to the vocalizations produced and detected within and across many species.”

So, just as dogs and cats (and their owners) can understand each other through vocalizations, singing seems to have emerged from similar sounds. Just as we can recognize the emotions behind basic human utterances like screaming or sighing, the researchers believe there’s a universal language behind what vocalists express in the way they sing.

AND ANOTHER THING…

Music is one of the things that makes us human. Understanding how our universal language evolved and why it makes us feel the way we do is part of unraveling the new story of who we are and our place in the world.

The fact that we all experience music in much the same way suggests it has a role to play in bringing humanity together. It’s already helping to usher in the new ecozoic era of harmony to which we aspire, through events like the Power Our Planet Festival or Live Earth.

The researchers conclude by writing, “We suspect that readers of this manuscript might be moved to dance by the dance songs studied here. How music does and does not transcend languages and cultures is a promising topic for future work.”

We always have more to learn if we dare to know.

Learn more:

Where is the love? Musical recognition crosses cultures — with an exception

Universal interpretations of vocal music

Music Training is Universal After All, Harvard Study Finds

Music Training Improves Brain Function and Mood

Swing and Sway the Chimpanzee Way