Mankind’s ability to produce melodies, Charles Darwin wrote in 1874, “must rank among the most mysterious with which he is endowed.”
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All human societies made music, and yet, for Darwin, it seemed to offer no advantage to our survival. He speculated that music evolved as a way to win over potential mates.
Other Victorian scientists were sceptical. William James said that music was simply a by-product of the workings of our minds, a “mere incidental peculiarity of the nervous system.”
The debate continues. Some experts are now developing new evolutionary explanations. Others maintain that music is a cultural invention, like writing, that did not need natural selection to exist. In recent years, scientists have studied these theories with big data. They have analyzed the acoustic properties of thousands of songs from dozens of cultures.
Now 75 researchers have published personal research on music. They sang songs from their own cultures.
The team of musicologists, psychologists, linguists, evolutionary biologists and professional musicians recorded songs in 55 languages, including Arabic, Basque, Cherokee, Maori, Ukrainian and Yoruba. The researchers found that songs share certain characteristics not found in speech, suggesting that Darwin may have been right: Despite its current diversity, music may have evolved in our distant ancestors.
It can be difficult for researchers to understand the structure and lyrics of songs from other cultures. Computers don’t analyze music very well either. “We thought we should bring in those involved,” said Yuto Ozaki, who earned his doctorate at Keio University in Japan by leading the project.
All team members chose traditional songs from their cultures to record. They also recited song lyrics without melody so the team could compare music and speech. And the researchers played their songs on a wide range of instruments, including zithers and melodicas.
In each recording, the researchers measured six characteristics, such as pitch and tempo. All songs shared characteristics that differentiated them from speech. The pitch was higher and more stable, for example, and the tempo slower.
Daniela Sammler, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, who was not involved in the study, warned that the singers were mostly academics and that the songs chosen could have introduced biases. The material, she said, “may not be representative.”
But he also noted that another study came to a similar conclusion. In that study, researchers analyzed songs from 18 languages and identified many of the same characteristics.
Songs may have distinctive characteristics because they play a special role in human communication other than speech, said Aniruddh Patel, a psychologist at Tufts University outside Boston, who was not involved in the study. Our brains seem to be sensitive to those characteristics. In 2022, Patel said, researchers discovered human neurons that responded only to singing, not to speech or music performed on instruments.
“There is something distinctive about songs from around the world like an acoustic signal that perhaps our brains have tuned into” over time, Patel said.
Ozaki said singing in choirs and sharing rhythms could have brought people together, either as a community or in preparation for battle.
But Sammler didn’t think the new study ruled out other roles for music, such as helping parents bond with their children. “It could support a lot of theories,” he said.
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