Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What,
if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of
mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries,
spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced
random ‘seed’ rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus
(as in the game of ‘telephone’), such that their biases (the prior) could be
estimated from the distribution of reproductions. ...
Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What,
if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of
mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries,
spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced
random ‘seed’ rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus
(as in the game of ‘telephone’), such that their biases (the prior) could be
estimated from the distribution of reproductions. Every tested group
showed a sparse prior with peaks at integer-ratio rhythms. However, the
importance of diferent integer ratios varied across groups, often refecting
local musical practices. Our results suggest a common feature of music
cognition: discrete rhythm ‘categories’ at small-integer ratios. These
discrete representations plausibly stabilize musical systems in the face of
cultural transmission but interact with culture-specifc traditions to yield
the diversity that is evident when mental representations are probed across
many cultures.
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