On the other hand, music is a part of specific cultures. The way that people express and understand music differs according to their backgrounds and experiences. Music from Bulgaria is different from music from Bali is different from music from Ghana is different from music from the royal court of Augustus III. Even within Western culture, what counts as a “classic” is different if your background is in jazz standards, classical violin, or hip-hop.
The question then becomes, how exactly is musical culture universal? Is what comes naturally to people the same across cultures, or does it depend on your particular musical experiences? Which musical qualities are shared across cultures? Of course, the difficulty with these questions is that you can’t just ask people of different cultures about how they understand music, because language is also part of culture, and that can affect responses. How do you study music without including language?
One recent study tried to solve this problem in an innovative way. Dr. Nori Jacobi and colleagues wanted to understand which rhythmic patterns come naturally to people in different cultures, and which were more difficult. If certain patterns occur across cultures, it’s evidence that they are more universal. On the other hand, if certain patterns are easy to understand in some cultures, but not in others, it’s evidence that they are more learned than innate.
In their study, they presented people with random repeated rhythmic patterns and asked them to clap along. To start, these patterns were truly random — not even notate-able, just random variations in time. But the key insight was that if the pattern was almost quarter-eighth-eighth [Ta, Titi], people tended to clap back that rhythm, rather than the random variations they heard. Then, taking inspiration from the children’s game of telephone, they played back a computerized version of the claps the participants produced and asked them to clap along. After a few iterations of this, they found that people’s responses tended to converge on a few simple rhythmic patterns, such as quarter-eighth-eighth or quarter-quarter-quarter. The patterns the participants converged on reflected the rhythms that were easiest for them to perceive and produce.
When North Americans did this task, they tended to converge on a few simple rhythms, including quarter-eighth-eighth and quarter-quarter-quarter, but there were also a few more complicated patterns as well, such as dotted quarter-dotted quarter-quarter (the beginning of a clave rhythm). These were the same regardless of musical training, showing that it reflects something in the culture, rather than specific training. On the other hand, participants from the Bolivian Amazon settled on a different pattern. They converged on the simple rhythms, but not on the dotted rhythms, showing that those rhythms are not part of their musical culture. A participant from Turkey converged on simple rhythms, as well as quarter-quarter-dotted quarter. Another group of participants even converged on quarter-dotted quarter-double-dotted half note.
The study showed that participants from across the world did converge on the same simple rhythmic patterns. However, within each culture, there were also idiosyncrasies and more complex patterns as well. The upshot? Yes, there is universality to musical patterns, but there is also the effect of one’s own musical culture. Musical patterns that seem obvious to a Western listener may be difficult for others, and patterns that others find obvious may be more difficult for Western listeners.
In sum, the evidence from this study shows that there are musical universals — musical concepts all humans share — but also variations between cultures that play a role in our understanding of music. For those interested in more detail on this study, Dr Nori Jacobi’s full presentation at McMaster’s 2020 NeuroMusic Conference can be found here.
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