The semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers of the Mentawai tribe live on a group of islands about a hundred kilometers off the coast of West Sumatra, Indonesia. They live off the taro and coconuts they grow, wear the bark of the gum tree around their loins, and rarely have access to the internet, radio or television in their traditional community homes.
And yet: when an anthropologist from the University of California shows the Mentawai an American dance song, they immediately understand that the song stimulates movement. Not because they’ve heard it before, but because something in the acoustic makeup of the music tells them so.
Recognizable worldwide
It is not only the Mentawai who can interpret sung music so well, says Lidya Yurdum, research assistant in psychology at the University of Amsterdam. Yurdum and her colleagues published an article about it in the scientific journal last September Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“For our research, we asked more than five thousand people from 48 different countries to guess what different types of sung music were for,” says the psychologist. ‘We played our respondents a song they didn’t know and asked: would you use this music to rock a baby to sleep? Or to dance to? A surprising number of people turned out to be able to estimate this very well.’
Non-Western perspective
Yurdum and her colleagues selected 118 unknown, sung songs from 86 different societies, a significant portion of which were non-Western. Never before has such a study been conducted on such a large scale.
“If you want to find out whether music is universally recognizable, you have to involve people from all over the world,” says Yurdum. ‘Until recently, mainly English-speaking societies were studied. The fact that we also interviewed relatively isolated communities, such as the Mentawai, allows us for the first time to rule out the possibility that we simply recognize music from the internet or the radio. We therefore expect that there is something in human nature that allows us to do this.’
Evolutionary adaptation
But what? To answer that question, more research is first needed, Yurdum emphasizes. But until then, a hypothesis is obvious.
‘People make music all over the world, and we all do it in much the same way. This allows us to determine the function of a song, even if we do not know where it came from. Now that we have been able to rule out that this recognisability is of a cultural nature, all arrows point in the direction of biology: as a species we are evolutionarily adapted to respond to music in a certain way.’
Universally soporific
For example, it could be that lullabies are universally sleep-inducing, because a lack of tonal difference calms our brain. Or that we all start dancing en masse in a club, because the exciting rhythm of dance music makes our hearts beat faster.
‘This is of course speculative,’ says Yurdum, ‘but there are other studies that point in the same direction. For example, we know that the heart rate of American babies slows down when they hear lullabies from places like South America, Scandinavia and a reserve in the Eastern Woodlands. It seems increasingly likely that we share something with each other worldwide that is reflected in our music.’
Editor
Merav Pront is a digital editor at National Geographic and also regularly writes for the magazine. During her studies in human geography, she learned to place local phenomena in an international context. As a freelance journalist, she looks for the small stories behind the big news. She writes for the VPRO and the National Holocaust Museum, among others.
2023-10-13 13:29:28
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