Songs across societies
Scientists at Harvard published a study on music as a cultural product, which examines what features of song tend to be shared across societies.
We sometimes talk about cultures and communities in terms of the music that represent them. I have been moved to tears more than once while listening to a song while visiting another country. One time while visiting a Japanese elementary school I looked down the row of American guests in an outdoor setting and there wasn’t a dry eye in the group.
The Harvard scientists set out to address big questions: Is music a cultural universal? If that’s a given, which musical qualities overlap across disparate societies? If it isn’t, why does it seem so ubiquitous? But they needed a data set of unprecedented breadth and depth. Over a five-year period, the team hunted down hundreds of recordings in libraries and private collections of scientists half a world away.
“We are so used to being able to find any piece of music that we like on the internet,” said Mehr, who is now a principal investigator at Harvard’s Music Lab. “But there are thousands and thousands of recordings buried in archives.
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