ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.)2019
Universality and diversity in human song.
Article in Science (New York, N.Y.), 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 196 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
196 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Prenatal attachment interventions: a comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis.Archives of women's mental health · 2025Pooled it
- Language experience predicts music processing in a half-million speakers of fifty-four languages.Current biology : CB · 2023Pooled it
- The Behavioural Economics of Music: Systematic review and future directions.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2023Pooled it
- Music Therapy Increases Social and Emotional Well-Being in Persons With Dementia: A Randomized Clinical Crossover Trial Comparing Singing to Verbal Discussion.Journal of music therapy · 2023Trial
- Expressing emotions through music.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Music and speech input in the home environments of Latinx infants.Infant behavior & development · 2026Article
- Humans, but not zebra finches, produce spontaneously isochronous song through the lifespan.iScience · 2026Article
- Language-like properties in the vocal behavior of animals.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2026Review
- Music-selective cortex is sensitive to structure in both pitch and time.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- The reciprocal relationship between maternal infant-directed singing and infant gaze.Musicae scientiae : the journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music · 2026Article
- Synergistic tension among the music and lyrics of late-Romantic choral songs.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The Ontogeny of Vocal Rhythms in a Non-Human Primate.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Decoding the evolution of melodic and harmonic structure of Western music through the lens of network science.Scientific reports · 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
- Singing to the newborn brain uncovers early traces of specialized neural networks.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- The Emergence of a Universal Rhythmic Feature: Simple Models Can Produce Categorical Rhythms.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Genetic and Environmental Influences on Singing Self-Evaluation and its Relationship with Singing Ability: An Australian Twin Study.Behavior genetics · 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
- Musicality is Preserved in Neurodegeneration.The Yale journal of biology and medicine · 2026Review
- Finding the groove in neural space.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
136 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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19 authors.
Funding
Abstract
What is universal about music, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world's societies, as well as a discography of audio recordings. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music (including songs with words) appears in every society observed; that music varies along three dimensions (formality, arousal, religiosity), more within societies than across them; and that music is associated with certain behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography-analyzed through machine summaries, amateur and expert listener ratings, and manual transcriptions-reveals that acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral context; that tonality is widespread, perhaps universal; that music varies in rhythmic and melodic complexity; and that elements of melodies and rhythms found worldwide follow power laws.
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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.