Despite participants’ unfamiliarity with the societies represented, the random sampling of each music excerpt, the very short duration, & the enormous diversity of this music, the ratings demonstrated accurate and cross-culturally reliable inferences about song functions on the basis of song forms alone

Form and Function in Human Song. Samuel A. Mehr et al. Current Biology, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.12.042

Highlights
•People in 60 countries listened to songs from 86 mostly small-scale societies
•They successfully inferred song functions on the basis of song form alone
•Listener ratings were guided by both contextual and musical features of the songs
•Human song therefore exhibits widespread form-function associations

Summary: Humans use music for a variety of social functions: we sing to accompany dance, to soothe babies, to heal illness, to communicate love, and so on. Across animal taxa, vocalization forms are shaped by their functions, including in humans. Here, we show that vocal music exhibits recurrent, distinct, and cross-culturally robust form-function relations that are detectable by listeners across the globe. In Experiment 1 , internet users (n = 750) in 60 countries listened to brief excerpts of songs, rating each song’s function on six dimensions (e.g., “used to soothe a baby”). Excerpts were drawn from a geographically stratified pseudorandom sample of dance songs, lullabies, healing songs, and love songs recorded in 86 mostly small-scale societies, including hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and subsistence farmers. Experiment 1 and its analysis plan were pre-registered. Despite participants’ unfamiliarity with the societies represented, the random sampling of each excerpt, their very short duration (14 s), and the enormous diversity of this music, the ratings demonstrated accurate and cross-culturally reliable inferences about song functions on the basis of song forms alone. In Experiment 2 , internet users (n = 1,000) in the United States and India rated three contextual features (e.g., gender of singer) and seven musical features (e.g., melodic complexity) of each excerpt. The songs’ contextual features were predictive of Experiment 1 function ratings, but musical features and the songs’ actual functions explained unique variance in function ratings. These findings are consistent with the existence of universal links between form and function in vocal music.

Keywords: music, song, form, function, vocalization, culture, evolution, diversity, universality