Can people hear universal messages in music?
Imagine being a researcher who has unlimited time and resources and a time machine that can travel anywhere in the world. You use these wondrous gifts to capture every song ever sung, whether by people in big cities or by small groups of hunter-gatherers. You play these recordings on random volunteers and ask them to guess the behavior that comes with each song. Was the song used to dance? For calming a baby? For cure disease? Can people guess what songs are meant for by their sound alone, without any knowledge of their cultural context?
Studying How People Think
When Samuel Mehr and Manvir Singh this scenario to 302 cognitive psychologists presented , who study how people think, predicted about 73 percent that the listeners would make accurate estimates. But when the duo surveyed 206 ethno-musicologists, who study the music of different cultures, only 29 percent felt the same. The two groups of scholars largely disagreed, and Mehr and Singh think ethno-musicologists are wrong. Music, they say, has certain universal characteristics that allow even untrained ears to predict its function.
