Is Music A Shared Language?
For most people, when you hear the first few bars of “Rock-A-Bye Baby,” you immediately know that the tune is a lullaby. But would you be able to pick out a lullaby from another culture?
This is the question that cognitive scientist Samuel Mehr and evolutionary biologist Manvir Singh were interested in answering. They played lullabies, dance songs, and other types of songs to random internet users to see if there was a universality between these musical forms.
Their results were published this week in a study inCurrent Biology. Mehr and Singh discuss whether music is universally understood across cultures, and how context and culture play a role in our understanding of music.
Listen to some of the different genres of music below.
Lullaby
Dance
Love
Main photo: A 1901 photo of two Kiowa Native Americans. Via Internet Archive Book Images [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons
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