Can You Tell a Lullaby From a Love Song? Find Out Now
- 6 years ago
Can You Tell a Lullaby From a Love Song? Find Out Now
“We’re interested in getting a sense of what’s the same,
and what’s not, across many, many cultures’ vocal music,” said Samuel Mehr, a cognitive scientist and one of the project’s directors (he also plays various woodwind instruments in the pit orchestra for musicals like “Chicago”).
Why is it that the crying baby falls asleep when I sing to it?’ These are old, old questions, but it’s now the case
that we have the computational tools to start really answering them.”
The project’s first paper, published in journal Current Biology this week, is an attempt to see if lullabies, dance songs, healing
and love songs contain features that make them recognizable to anyone.
“What this means is that in the cultures we studied, songs
that are used for dancing, to calm babies down and in ceremonies of the shamanistic, spiritual type, share enough features that it’s likely not only are they universal types of music, but the way they’re performed has universals,” Dr. Mehr said.
“If you go back to people like Darwin and Herbert Spencer,” Dr. Mehr continued, “they all wrote about music
and every one of them said, ‘This is weird, why do we do this?
The alternative explanation is that everyone who did the test shares a culture, and
that influenced their decisions — “They’re all internet users, they’ve all probably heard Taylor Swift and Bieber,” Dr. Mehr admitted.
But a group of Harvard scientists is trying to find out whether
that is really the case, or whether there are actually universal features underpinning all our songs, in a project called The Natural History of Song.
“We’re interested in getting a sense of what’s the same,
and what’s not, across many, many cultures’ vocal music,” said Samuel Mehr, a cognitive scientist and one of the project’s directors (he also plays various woodwind instruments in the pit orchestra for musicals like “Chicago”).
Why is it that the crying baby falls asleep when I sing to it?’ These are old, old questions, but it’s now the case
that we have the computational tools to start really answering them.”
The project’s first paper, published in journal Current Biology this week, is an attempt to see if lullabies, dance songs, healing
and love songs contain features that make them recognizable to anyone.
“What this means is that in the cultures we studied, songs
that are used for dancing, to calm babies down and in ceremonies of the shamanistic, spiritual type, share enough features that it’s likely not only are they universal types of music, but the way they’re performed has universals,” Dr. Mehr said.
“If you go back to people like Darwin and Herbert Spencer,” Dr. Mehr continued, “they all wrote about music
and every one of them said, ‘This is weird, why do we do this?
The alternative explanation is that everyone who did the test shares a culture, and
that influenced their decisions — “They’re all internet users, they’ve all probably heard Taylor Swift and Bieber,” Dr. Mehr admitted.
But a group of Harvard scientists is trying to find out whether
that is really the case, or whether there are actually universal features underpinning all our songs, in a project called The Natural History of Song.