Human song is universal

Channels McGill University News and Events Music, including songs with words, appears to be a universal phenomenon according to a paper published this week in Science. An international team of researchers involving musicians, data scientists, psychologists, political scientists and linguists, including one from McGill University, reached this conclusion after five years of collaboration, bringing together a broad range of skills and tools to the question of whether music is universal. Using broad datasets to arrive at deep conclusions about music To answer questions about which aspects of music were similar and different across disparate societies, the researchers needed to use datasets of unprecedented breadth and depth. They looked at every society for which there was ethnographic information in a large online database, 315 in all, and found mention of music in all of them. They collected around 5,000 descriptions of song from a subset of 60 cultures spanning 30 distinct geographic regions. "This database of ethnographic texts is a real treasure," said McGill linguist Timothy O'Donnell , who brought his skills as a data scientist to the project. He was excited about applying the Artifical Intelligence techniques he typically uses to work with language to look at music.