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People’s emotional responses to music seem to transcend culture, language and geography. Does this universality mean that music has a common evolutionary basis?< /p>

Without exception, different human cultures produce some form of music. However, these musical cultures appear to be very different from each other, with a wide variety of rhythms, melodies, dynamics and harmonies, from Italian opera to Croatian klapa to Tuvan throat singing, highlighting the diversity of civilizations around the world. Creative diversity.

Like language, music is ubiquitous among humans, but its absence from even our closest non-human relatives is at least beyond our comprehension. But music, unlike language, has no apparent adaptive function, prompting music scientists to wonder what forces helped music emerge in the first place. Is music an evolutionary adaptation, or a purely human invention?

This is a very old question, as Charles Darwin discussed it in his 1871 book The Descent of Man. ), who suggested that music may have evolved to help our ancestors attract potential mates. Others believe that music evolved from vocalizations used to coordinate territorial defense, such as those observed in other social animals, including chimpanzees.

But many scholars, especially ethnomusicologists, have always been wary of this so-called "adaptationist approach." This approach offers thought-provoking explanations, but it lacks solid evidence when it comes to linking music to reproductive health. One popular view is that musicality is not a human trait but a technology, a result of a pre-existing adaptation that is both beautiful and exciting and has no evolutionary advantage.

One way to resolve this debate is to look for uniqueness in music, in pitch, melody, rhythm, harmony, timbre, texture, and in social music where there is no contact with each other. *sex. If music is, as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow put it, "the universal language of mankind," then it stands to reason that our taste for music may be biologically derived. instinct.

Cognitive scientist Sam Mehr, director of the Music Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, said: "Any study is essentially a comparison of a large number of different cultures. "It tells us a lot about human nature, and it also proves that humans are similar in some aspects." Psychologists have always believed that human language has such universality. Beginning in the 1920s, German-American Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Kohler conducted experiments in which participants were shown images of two shapes, one jagged and A pointed pattern, and the other is a spherical circular pattern.

When participants were asked to label the shapes using the meaningless words "takete" and "baluba," they overwhelmingly associated "takete" with the pointed pattern. Associating "baluba" with circular pattern shapes. This effect has been shown to work in children as young as two and a half years old.

Maybe music has a similar effect. In a paper co-authored with Manvir Singh, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, Dr. Meher and colleagues collected sample vocal recordings from 86 small social groups, including the Outer Hebri. The Scottish Highland accent on the Bottom Islands, Chuukese in Micronesia, Nanai in the Russian Far East, etc.

The research team also conducted 14-second interviews with 750 Internet users in 60 countries, and found that these listeners could correctly identify whether a sample was from a dance song, lullaby, love song, or healing song. "It didn't seem to matter where the audience was from, they all seemed to agree very much with each other, it was a very high level of consistency," Meher said.

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But why do songs from different cultures evoke the same feelings in different listeners? American-Canadian cognitive neuroscientist, musician, and record producer Daniel Levitin Said: "Some lyrics sound like they represent different things, very slow music sounds more like someone walking slowly, and fast music sounds more like people running or celebrating. Those things have seeped into this different kind of music. ”

Meher said this experiment is just the first of his multidisciplinary “natural history of music” project, and that he is particularly interested in studying lullabies. These songs are thought to exist in every culture , but has been overlooked by researchers, who tend to focus on music associated with courtship or public celebrations

Sandra, a psychologist at the University of Toronto and an expert on how babies respond to music. Sandra Trehub said: “If women make music, which is often the case, you often don’t see it, or it goes unreported. It tends not to be the kind of cultural music that is famous or considered important. "

As any parent knows, getting your kids to sleep efficiently can free up more time for housework, sleep, and even having more kids. "In the Western world," Terry Hab said , we pride ourselves on calming babies. But elsewhere, singing babies to sleep is just a game, and it works. I've seen it work like magic everywhere.

Of course, lullabies may be just one part of the story. "Music evolved not for one reason, but for several reasons," Levitin said. I think new research supports this idea. I have never seen a group of more than 18 male primates that could not live in harmony because of rivalry and suspicion. Yet, for thousands of years, humans have lived in thousands of cities. So we came up with some ways to express our desire to live in harmony. ”