ArticleCurrent biology : CB2018
Form and Function in Human Song.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 54 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
54 citing papers in PubMed, 288 citations in OpenAlex.
- The influence of maternal singing on well-being, postpartum depression and bonding - a randomised, controlled trial.BMC pregnancy and childbirth · 2021Trial
- Expressing emotions through music.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Music is a distinct perceptual category with subjective grounds.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- InCHORRRuS: Infant-Directed Communication Highlights and Organizes Repetition and Redundancy Through Rhythmic Structure.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Review
- Chants across seven traditions share acoustic traits that enhance subjective relaxation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Sounds of Hidden Agents: The Development of Causal Reasoning About Musical Sounds.Developmental science · 2025Article
- CoVox: A dataset of contrasting vocalizations.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Multiscale synchronisation dynamics reveals the impact of an improvisatory approach to performance on music experience.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Temporal patterns in the complexity of child-directed song lyrics reflect their functions.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- The Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, A Global Corpus of Vocal Music.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Misophonia reactions in the general population are correlated with strong emotional reactions to other everyday sensory-emotional experiences.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Sounds like a fight: listeners can infer behavioural contexts from spontaneous nonverbal vocalisations.Cognition & emotion · 2024Article
- Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- The Headphone and Loudspeaker Test-Part II: A comprehensive method for playback device screening in Internet experiments.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Preliminary Evidence for Global Properties in Human Listeners During Natural Auditory Scene Perception.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Love songs and serenades: a theoretical review of music and romantic relationships.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Biological principles for music and mental health.Translational psychiatry · 2023Review
- Is song processing distinct and special in the auditory cortex?Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2023Review
- Universal interpretations of vocal music.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Web-based psychoacoustics of binaural hearing: Two validation experiments.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.