Is Music 'Universal'?

Factual Questions
1

Just purely scientifically-speaking, is music universal?

I mean, is it reducible to some other science–like math? If some advanced extraterrestrial came to earth, would he recognize our music? And would he like it too?

I was watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind on the Sci-Fi channel a little while ago. And it is integral to that story. But that movie doesn’t score well in the accuracy department anyways. (I think they are the first to depict advanced ET’s as greys.) So that isn’t the best example.

But back to my original question: music universal–yes or no?

:slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

2

Hermit crabs (as far as I know) show no discernible appreciation of music, and hermit crabs are vastly more similar to us than any aliens would be. Aliens can no more be expected to like Earth music than they can be expected to like Earth food or Earth girls (easy or not.)

3

Music is certainly universal and instinctual among humans.

For other species, birdsong is music or pretty close to it, and is widespread. On the other hand I have never noticed dogs or cats responding to music. So I think we will have to wait until ET arrives and asks for more Chuck Barry to be sure.

4

Some things about music are based on physics. I can’t remember the details now, but something like if you play the 1st, 4th and 5th notes of a scale at the same time, that sounds harmonious to us. In physics terms, the soundwaves of those notes together reinforce the amplitude, and cancel out some of the extra ‘noise’ in the wave pattern. Aliens that can sense sound waves might notice the physical harmony, even if they interpret it differently psychologically.

5

We recognise 1/4 tone music (widely played in other cultures) as music. But we don’t like it. People who like R&B or HipHop often don’t like C&W at all. Chance that somehting from a different musical culture is going to like our music must be pretty small.

But birds like our music (and our chain-saws) well enough to encorporate it in their repertoire, so appreciation on some level might be possible.

6

Speak for yourself. I’m about as white as it gets, and I enjoy plenty of non-western music, including microtonal music. And note bending is pretty common in western music anyway, and has been for a long time now.

7

Rhythm and tone would certainly be discernible to any creature that has an organ for hearing sound waves. I would doubt that sufficient research has been done with hermit crabs to say with any certainty that they could not be taught to react to rhythm and tone detectable to their sensory system.

As for what is defined as music, I have a neighbor with pretty elaborate speaker systems, and I’ve never heard anything coming from them that would meet my criteria for “music”, defined as an art form. There is rhythm, and sometimes even tone coming from them, though.

For what its worth, my nieces always arrived home from school to find their pet dog waiting for them at the front door. It was determined that the dog learned to associate the theme music of a soap opera on TV with the impending arrival of the children. However, granted, the cue for the dog did not have to be music, but turning off the TV before the theme had the experimental effect of disorienting the dog’s behavior.

8

They might beg to differ.

9

I think you could make a case that the basics of harmony are going to be readily understood by any creature past a certain level of intelligence. Understood at least in the sense that there is a certain mathematical structure from which you can apply various rules to build amusing constructs of tones and sequences thereof. Melody as an application of rules derived from harmony isn’t a big step, but again little more than amusing patterns. But that is probably about as far as you are ever likely to get. Rhythm seems to be much deeper in our heads, and closely relates to a very strong sense of time that is wired into our heads. No reason to imagine that any alien being has a comparable sense would relate to our sense of rhythm.

Rather than the lower animals, we can look at some of the higher animals. Dolphins and whales clearly have quite highly developed sonic and aural abilities - probably better than ours. Indeed you could imagine them asking amongst themselves - “do these funny bipedal creatures have any sense of music?” - and concluding that we don’t have the mental or physical capability for it.

In general music has become a highly developed art form in human society. Most of what you listen to and enjoy you have learnt how to enjoy - often by listening to simpler elements. The ability to tease out the deeper structures and ideas in music isn’t something you come to cold. Indeed a lot of music really depends upon you having come to it with some background in what has come before. Just like literature, poetry, or the visual arts.

The manner in which the core elements of emotion and expressiveness in music relate to aspects of being human are deep. Music breaths and speaks in a manner close to how we breath and speak,and its pace beats with our heart-rate. The expressive power of the timbre of individual instruments is partly rooted in our experience and partly rooted in our evolution. Most of all, music sings as we sing. Our music is tied to our physical form and our psychological nature. We should reasonably expect that any other creature’s music is tied to them in the same manner. We may both recognise from a scientific point of view that each is making what is for them “music” but the ability to go further and bridge the gap into the core of what that music means and expresses is likely too big a gap to bridge.

10

(You, something just occurred to me. Cecil Adams might like this question. Just insert: “Dear Cecil” and “Jim B.” Thank you to all who replied. And thank you Mr. Adams in advance, if you decide to take my question. :).)

11

Another thing too. I should tell you all what partly inspired me to post this question. Back when I was in hs (so no cite–sorry) I learned that back in the Middle Ages, in the universities, music was considered part of the math department. WTH! Music is part of math?

I know that the term “liberal arts” comes from the fact that the courses were all that a free man was required to know at the time.

But music=math in the Middle Ages? Why? I think you can see my confusion there at least.

12

Yes, there are some universal aspects to what we call music. But some differences too. The note we call “A” is 440 cycles per second. A music lover from another star system may use some time interval different than our second, so the cycle count would differ. But whatever name you use for the note, if you double the frequency you’ll raise the pitch by an octave (though it’d have a different name). Halve it and you’ll lower it by an octave.

Our Western music uses a 12 note chromatic scale. Other music types could be decimal with an 10 note scales. As to perceived harmonious versus dissonant sounding intervals, I suspect it’s a matter of conditioning.

13

There is a pretty good evidence that the musical scales, although different mostly derive from the the same underlying mathematics. That the mathematics is not perfect and there are clear historical lineages for what a society considers tonal is however a key thing.

There are really two competing ways of generating the scales. You start with a note (really any frequency at all) and apply a set of simple ratios to it. 3:2 gets you the fifth, 4:3 - a fourth, 5:4 - major third, 6:5 minor third, 16:15 a semitone, 9:8 tone, 15:8 major seventh, 16:9 minor seventh, 8:5 minor sixth, 5:3 major 6th. However you can already buy an argument about more than a few of these.
Of course the other way of getting them all is via the circle of fifths, where you just keep multiplying by 3/2 and halving whenever you get a ratio large than unity. A scheme that gets you close to the same set of ratios as before, but not quite. (The unique prime factorisation theorem bites hard here - you can only have 2 and 3 as factors - so no factors of 5.) But it does get you a scheme where you can transpose.

The circle of fifths is interesting in that it can never get you back to the start. You just stop when the next note you get is within an acceptable range of your starting note. Doing so naturally gets us 3 different scales quite quickly. A pentatonic, the western 12 tone, and a 43 note (microtonal.) The 43 note scale allows us to get closer to the “proper” values. But never exact. Then you can look at Just intonation, and it goes rapidly ever more complicated. What matters here is that the number of notes isn’t an arbitrary choice.
There are also a huge underlying set of technical questions about the nature of harmony here. The easy introductory way of looking at harmony looks to these ratios and looks for interplaying ratios that result in more low order ratios (and avoiding higher order ratios). This is the point where we can think of music as messing about with mathematical rules. The rules of harmony can be derived in a reasonably regular manner, and the rules for simple melody come out soon after.
But that would only get us short distance into human music. Nothing here tells you about the nuances of the harmony, tells you why the different scales sound different and have different emotional impact. Why does moving a single note in a scale (say major to minor scale) utterly change the impact? Bach’s six-part ricercar from his Musical Offering might be a most fabulous example of ingenuity, and the subject of much mathematical analysis, but it is also quite beautiful.

Once you get into the last century of music all this goes out the window. Dissonance started to make inroads into western music about 150 years ago, but was present in other cultures long before (and was appropriated from there in some cases). The increasing ability of music to express complex things is clearly tied to the increasing richness of harmonic theory as much as anything else, and we are past any easy sort of mathematical structure to provide guidance on how to make such music. (I attended a perform of Rach 2 and Shostakovitch’s 5th a couple of days ago. Magnificent. I challenge anyone to work out how to explain either piece to an alien species.)

The point?
Some of this comes down to the specific manner in which our ears work, and the limitations to our ability to discern frequencies. Our ear can discern individual tones very well, but the masking effects mean that as the music becomes more harmonically rich, small scale shifts in frequencies are not discernable - which is really why we get away with using the equal tempered scale - despite its clear flaws. Western music puts up with the limitations of the diatonic scale, whereas some others (Indian especially) has harmonic nuances westerners can barely - if at all - register. But all of us are limited by the construction of our ears. Another species might be expected to have different frequency resolution capabilities - they might hear with a totally differently constructed sensory system, and that will mean a potentially different set of rules for harmony, and thus pretty much all music. They might have a huge frequency response capability say sound up to 1MHz, but have barely any ability to resolve frequency differences with ratios of less than about 3:2. They might have exquisite frequency resolution, down to being able to haul out dissonance in harmony of about one cent. Both might have highly developed music. Neither would be able to understand much about our music, nor we theirs - although we might all agree that each was making music.

14

Beautiful and clearly put, Francis — thanks.

15

Humans have evolved to depend on hearing for survival.

We assess risk by noticing standout sounds, and assessing their intent.

Harmonies stand out from disorganized noise. There is an underlying math that describes how harmonies are organized. But we “hear the math” of organized sounds.

So, is music universal? Any species that relies on sound and focuses on pattern recognition will focus on organized sounds.

Adding consciousness to the mix leads to Humans “playing” with organized sound. If organized sound trips our neurons, we realized we could manipulate sound to trip those neurons ourselves. Different populations organize their sounds in different ways - 12 tones, microtones, etc - but those are minor variations on the overall foundation.

So yes, music as Human manipulation of organized sound, to exploit our survival tools to generate neural/emotional responses intentionally, is universal. That’s how I approach it.

16

For those who have to see an explanation, here is a Youtube on why a piano needs to be tempered.

17

I have heard that people in other cultures hear the emotions of the music and cues differently from western audiences, that there is cultural specificity, but I have also heard that there is intercultural music understanding of emotional content.

These ideas don’t seem compatible, unless they are partial truths.

18

I hope so - otherwise the music that has been put on the Voyager space probe will have been wasted.