ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Statistical universals reveal the structures and functions of human music.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 187 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
187 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Music and trust formation: a scoping review of neurobiological convergence and research priorities.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Pooled it
- Effectiveness of music therapy for children with autism spectrum disorder: meta-analysis and potential biological mechanisms.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- The Behavioural Economics of Music: Systematic review and future directions.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2023Pooled it
- Performing arts as a health resource? An umbrella review of the health impacts of music and dance participation.PloS one · 2021Pooled it
- Cortico-striatal network architecture shapes rhythmic biases in music.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Expressing emotions through music.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Female Budgerigars Attend Equally to Rhythmic Beat or Repetition, While Humans Prioritize Their Combination.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Critical Review on the Development and Evolution of Beat Perception.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Review
- Humans, but not zebra finches, produce spontaneously isochronous song through the lifespan.iScience · 2026Article
- Salient features of task-irrelevant continuous speech distort subjective time.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2026Article
- Universal and Cross-Cultural Variations in Audio-Motor Synchronization Between French and Indian Participants.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Music is a distinct perceptual category with subjective grounds.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The Ontogeny of Vocal Rhythms in a Non-Human Primate.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Listening to a Consonant Chord Progression during Live Face-to-Face Gaze Enhances Neural Activity in Social Systems.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- The Emergence of a Universal Rhythmic Feature: Simple Models Can Produce Categorical Rhythms.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Novel Approach to Inter-Onset-Interval Ratio Uncovers Music-Like Rhythmic Patterns in Budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus) Warble Song.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Finding the groove in neural space.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Human newborns form musical predictions based on rhythmic but not melodic structure.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Article
- A chill brain-music interface for enhancing music chills with personalized playlists.iScience · 2026Article
127 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Music has been called "the universal language of mankind." Although contemporary theories of music evolution often invoke various musical universals, the existence of such universals has been disputed for decades and has never been empirically demonstrated. Here we combine a music-classification scheme with statistical analyses, including phylogenetic comparative methods, to examine a well-sampled global set of 304 music recordings. Our analyses reveal no absolute universals but strong support for many statistical universals that are consistent across all nine geographic regions sampled. These universals include 18 musical features that are common individually as well as a network of 10 features that are commonly associated with one another. They span not only features related to pitch and rhythm that are often cited as putative universals but also rarely cited domains including performance style and social context. These cross-cultural structural regularities of human music may relate to roles in facilitating group coordination and cohesion, as exemplified by the universal tendency to sing, play percussion instruments, and dance to simple, repetitive music in groups. Our findings highlight the need for scientists studying music evolution to expand the range of musical cultures and musical features under consideration. The statistical universals we identified represent important candidates for future investigation.
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