Humans everywhere seem wired to favour simple integer-ratio rhythms, but culture tweaks which rhythms become “natural.” This suggests a shared rhythm cognition backbone, yet enough flexibility to account for global musical diversity. The study is a solid counter to the claim that music structure is purely learned or arbitrary, while also showing culture doesn’t just ride on biology: it shapes what we actually use.
If you’re into music cognition, evolution of culture, or cognitive universals vs cultural diversity, this is the kind of data you want to see.
I don't think it's only humans. All kinds of animals would benefit from knowing that awhoo comes from a wolf and that, in this example, awhoo awhoo is the same sound coming from the same wolf or that an animal recognizes that the first awhoo comes from one wolf and the second awhoo from another wolf.
It also helps for an animal to know the volume of these awhoos as it is a good proxy for closeness, and therefore danger. It's even a good thing to know the rhythm of these awhoos as it helps again to assess if these wolves, or wolf, is on the move while awhooing or on the move between awhoos.
And this is just one example I'm currently making up bit at least makes sense that for many animals: tempo, volume, rhythm, patterns in sound, it's needed for survival. So evolution will select for it.
Music is a lot more than just those things I think, but it at least shows some evolutionary backbone as to why I believe that more animals have been evolved to like music. At least, some elephants sure seem to enjoy a good piano [1].
> All kinds of animals would benefit from knowing that awhoo comes from a wolf and that, in this example, awhoo awhoo is the same sound coming from the same wolf or that an animal recognizes that the first awhoo comes from one wolf and the second awhoo from another wolf.
Interesting choice of example. Dog howls are apparently intentionally off-key.
The goal of the basic choir is to sound like one voice in perfect harmony.
The goal of a pack howling over long distances is apparently to communicate that every member of the pack is present - so each voice is out of harmony with the rest.
Musical appreciation is almost shockingly absent from animals.
One possible reason is that allowing one’s nervous system to be entrained to external rhythms is potentially exploitable. So humans may have evolved the ability to “let the guard down.”
This is pretty fascinating, do you have anything else to say about it? Makes me think of mesmerism and snake-charmers, although IDK how real that is.
Another thing that comes to mind is recent pop-sci talking about how individual bees can measure time pretty accurately, which I personally found very surprising, even though I've heard that they "dance" for communication.
Rhythm appreciation is neurologically very interesting since it requires several basic abilities acting at once, including tracking time, but also a certain amount of memory and pattern recognition. Animal appreciation of melodic stuff and harmony is interesting too but seems much harder to study and more dependent on physical aspects of ears
I have a theory for this, but I don't know how I'd test for it (and I don't work in the field).
We have a time window within which audio stimulae are interpreted as being "the same sound". When you hear two impulses outside that window, they seem to be different sounds. You can play with this by looping two similar or copies of a sound and then varying their offset a few ms either way. They'll move in and out of seeming like the same and different sounds, and around the crossover point you get ringing effects (especially if there's more than two copies, such as with tight echoes).
To me, this seems like a fundamental part of music interpretation. Not the core, but very significant.
Also, different species have different time perceptions. (I mean, I'm kinda guessing, but they all have different heart rate ranges, attention spans, brain wave frequency ranges etc, all of which imply to me a varience in time perception). Our music makes sense against our time perception; we're quite sensitive to it... raise the bmp of a track by just 2 or 3 and it feels quite different. Change from 50% swing to 53% (or 52 if you're really sensitive) and your sense of the groove changes meaningfully. Pass all that through the "different perception of time" and it's easy to imagine our music means nothing to other species.
It also seems likely to me that:
a) most species have different sized windows
b) they perceive blends of frequencies quite differently depending on the window length
So, what seems like coherent, organised sound with a "story" or "meaning" or "structure" to us, probably becomes mush to most other species.
Then note that the different frequency ranges in which animals hear, the different ways their ears focus sound... etc. Us humans are creating organised sound around the biology of our auditory system; the perception of organisation is likely very different for most other species.
Just the difference between boom and bap, boom ... bap... boom... bap... tells us "something". but it's gonna tell you something different if you hear it as ttppssssss daaaaapppp ttpppssssss ddaaappppp.
> Humans everywhere seem wired to favour simple integer-ratio rhythms
That's what people write in the sheet music, but reality is more complicated than that. Notably in swung rhythms ratios are blurry (and dependent on BPM) and specific performers in band will play different ratios at the same time (e.g. drummer will play straighter, soloist will swing more).
If I understand it right, Toussaint's 2005 paper showed that many common rhythms across world music can be generated by distributing beats as evenly as possible.
Some of the patterns in this newer research are Euclidean, but the broader finding is that people have a natural affinity for small-integer-ratio rhythms generally. So this is empirical evidence of why these mathematically simple patterns (including Euclidean rhythms) show up across world music.
Both statements are true. We have a strong tendency for integer ratios in harmony, and just intonation often sounds out of tune.
Integer ratios are the base upon which harmony is built. Temperament is a subtle modification that sounds very close to integer ratios, but allows more complex harmonic structures where dissonance is evenly spread out across all the relationships between tones.
But the whole point of 12-TET is it is a close approximation of those just intervals while still allowing multiple keys to be played without retuning the instrument. If the close mathematical approximation didn't exist, there would be no reason to tune your instruments with a logarithmic recurrence relation.
> allowing multiple keys to be played without retuning the instrument
That's another simplification, real pianos are not tuned to 12TET, but use stretch tuning (which can be over 30cents off in the lower range).
I'd rather argue that people like what they're used to and so "people like pure ratios" is seemingly only true if "pure ratios" are not really pure. And that's ignoring a lot of the music that doesn't have roots in Europe.
"Universal music cognition" requires a strong exclusionary premise about what counts as music and more importantly what doesn't count as music.
Sure maybe you don't consider 4'33" music. That does not mean other people do not experience it as music in the normal ways people can experience music such as buying tickets, putting on fancy clothes and sitting in a performance space at an appointed time and as an excuse to go out to dinner and/or on a date.
But if your musical interest extends much beyond a Methodist hymnal, there are probably people who will opine that the subject of those interests are not "real" music.
To be clear, I am not opining that *4'33" is or isn't "real" music. Only that in a scientific context, there is no objective way to distinguish between music and non-music. Some cultures have practices that we can label "music" but within the culture they do not play a language game that includes the label "music."
Which is to say that any ecumenical approach to music in a scientific context is so broad as to be meaningless.
433 was more of a statement/exercise in listening. It's interesting to explore the edges of what counts as music, but in practice, people can tell when something is music made for enjoyment by other people.
Enjoyment is a strong word! Some music is written to share ideas and experiments, so it might not be 'enjoyable' to listen to, but 'interesting' - kind of like the difference between reading a Harry Potter book which is engaging and doesn't ask too much of you, and Spinoza, which requires your full attention.
I think music is more universal than you suggest (or people may think you're suggesting).
Trying to classify things as music is a normative approach - saying what music should be. There's always exceptions to rules, as you point out, and people will always disagree and find exceptions.
The article is a descriptive approach - it studies what people think music is.
You can treat music as information. If it's not information, it's just noise.
Sometimes it has a low information density. People like to sing along to stuff they recognise. Sometimes it has higher density - a surprise bit of syncopation or an unusual note. Music is a variation in pitch and rhythm (etc) that is boring enough (in the context of the priors) to be familiar, but not too boring.
OTOH look at how tone poems flopped. There are patterns that are naturally easier to learn - rhythms (in the article) and maybe scales and harmonies (though this is clearly a bit more complex - not every culture has the old Mesopotamian diatonic scales that the Pythagorians formalised). But like Chomsky theorised with grammar, there might be defaults (or a range of defaults) that humans are naturally drawn to as the priors.
This is why a better acronym for IDM is Information Dense Music, it's less pretentious and it explains why it's very close to noise ;)
Of course, I'd argue Bach and Debussy are very information-dense too but they somehow manage to stay uncluttered. The really great thing about music is that encodes information on many different levels, Claude Shannon notwithstanding
Very interesting problem to even consider. That said, I don’t think we even understand the what, how, and why of music. The rhythm precognition aspect mentioned in another comment makes me think it’s just a byproduct of time and counting with pattern recognition, not necessarily a music thing just a correlation by virtue of physics and the laws of the universe.
Humans everywhere seem wired to favour simple integer-ratio rhythms, but culture tweaks which rhythms become “natural.” This suggests a shared rhythm cognition backbone, yet enough flexibility to account for global musical diversity. The study is a solid counter to the claim that music structure is purely learned or arbitrary, while also showing culture doesn’t just ride on biology: it shapes what we actually use.
If you’re into music cognition, evolution of culture, or cognitive universals vs cultural diversity, this is the kind of data you want to see.
I don't think it's only humans. All kinds of animals would benefit from knowing that awhoo comes from a wolf and that, in this example, awhoo awhoo is the same sound coming from the same wolf or that an animal recognizes that the first awhoo comes from one wolf and the second awhoo from another wolf.
It also helps for an animal to know the volume of these awhoos as it is a good proxy for closeness, and therefore danger. It's even a good thing to know the rhythm of these awhoos as it helps again to assess if these wolves, or wolf, is on the move while awhooing or on the move between awhoos.
And this is just one example I'm currently making up bit at least makes sense that for many animals: tempo, volume, rhythm, patterns in sound, it's needed for survival. So evolution will select for it.
Music is a lot more than just those things I think, but it at least shows some evolutionary backbone as to why I believe that more animals have been evolved to like music. At least, some elephants sure seem to enjoy a good piano [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFIT87yPNYk
> All kinds of animals would benefit from knowing that awhoo comes from a wolf and that, in this example, awhoo awhoo is the same sound coming from the same wolf or that an animal recognizes that the first awhoo comes from one wolf and the second awhoo from another wolf.
Interesting choice of example. Dog howls are apparently intentionally off-key.
The goal of the basic choir is to sound like one voice in perfect harmony.
The goal of a pack howling over long distances is apparently to communicate that every member of the pack is present - so each voice is out of harmony with the rest.
Musical appreciation is almost shockingly absent from animals.
One possible reason is that allowing one’s nervous system to be entrained to external rhythms is potentially exploitable. So humans may have evolved the ability to “let the guard down.”
This is pretty fascinating, do you have anything else to say about it? Makes me think of mesmerism and snake-charmers, although IDK how real that is.
Another thing that comes to mind is recent pop-sci talking about how individual bees can measure time pretty accurately, which I personally found very surprising, even though I've heard that they "dance" for communication.
Rhythm appreciation is neurologically very interesting since it requires several basic abilities acting at once, including tracking time, but also a certain amount of memory and pattern recognition. Animal appreciation of melodic stuff and harmony is interesting too but seems much harder to study and more dependent on physical aspects of ears
Yes, discussed in this paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neurorobotics/articles/...
I have a theory for this, but I don't know how I'd test for it (and I don't work in the field).
We have a time window within which audio stimulae are interpreted as being "the same sound". When you hear two impulses outside that window, they seem to be different sounds. You can play with this by looping two similar or copies of a sound and then varying their offset a few ms either way. They'll move in and out of seeming like the same and different sounds, and around the crossover point you get ringing effects (especially if there's more than two copies, such as with tight echoes).
To me, this seems like a fundamental part of music interpretation. Not the core, but very significant.
Also, different species have different time perceptions. (I mean, I'm kinda guessing, but they all have different heart rate ranges, attention spans, brain wave frequency ranges etc, all of which imply to me a varience in time perception). Our music makes sense against our time perception; we're quite sensitive to it... raise the bmp of a track by just 2 or 3 and it feels quite different. Change from 50% swing to 53% (or 52 if you're really sensitive) and your sense of the groove changes meaningfully. Pass all that through the "different perception of time" and it's easy to imagine our music means nothing to other species.
It also seems likely to me that:
a) most species have different sized windows
b) they perceive blends of frequencies quite differently depending on the window length
So, what seems like coherent, organised sound with a "story" or "meaning" or "structure" to us, probably becomes mush to most other species.
Then note that the different frequency ranges in which animals hear, the different ways their ears focus sound... etc. Us humans are creating organised sound around the biology of our auditory system; the perception of organisation is likely very different for most other species.
Just the difference between boom and bap, boom ... bap... boom... bap... tells us "something". but it's gonna tell you something different if you hear it as ttppssssss daaaaapppp ttpppssssss ddaaappppp.
Music is a hack.
That's a wild claim. Online media abounds with vids of dogs and cows showing obvious attention to music.
Edit: and... songbirds exist.
What a fascinating answer, this makes a lot of sense from a chaos theory perspective. Exploiting a hyper developed sense with modern tooling
> Humans everywhere seem wired to favour simple integer-ratio rhythms
That's what people write in the sheet music, but reality is more complicated than that. Notably in swung rhythms ratios are blurry (and dependent on BPM) and specific performers in band will play different ratios at the same time (e.g. drummer will play straighter, soloist will swing more).
I'm not an expert but I was just looking into this so I will leave this link here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_rhythm
If I understand it right, Toussaint's 2005 paper showed that many common rhythms across world music can be generated by distributing beats as evenly as possible. Some of the patterns in this newer research are Euclidean, but the broader finding is that people have a natural affinity for small-integer-ratio rhythms generally. So this is empirical evidence of why these mathematically simple patterns (including Euclidean rhythms) show up across world music.
And a strong tendency for integer ratios in chords. So is this about compressibility?
Many just intonation chords (where ratios are actually integers, not approximations of them) will sound out of tune to most people.
Both statements are true. We have a strong tendency for integer ratios in harmony, and just intonation often sounds out of tune.
Integer ratios are the base upon which harmony is built. Temperament is a subtle modification that sounds very close to integer ratios, but allows more complex harmonic structures where dissonance is evenly spread out across all the relationships between tones.
But the whole point of 12-TET is it is a close approximation of those just intervals while still allowing multiple keys to be played without retuning the instrument. If the close mathematical approximation didn't exist, there would be no reason to tune your instruments with a logarithmic recurrence relation.
> allowing multiple keys to be played without retuning the instrument
That's another simplification, real pianos are not tuned to 12TET, but use stretch tuning (which can be over 30cents off in the lower range).
I'd rather argue that people like what they're used to and so "people like pure ratios" is seemingly only true if "pure ratios" are not really pure. And that's ignoring a lot of the music that doesn't have roots in Europe.
FWIW it doesn't get better than 12-TET until you get to (like) 53-TET.
Out of tune or just cold?
Typical person on the internet will be really used to 12 tone equal temperament, for just tuning most intervals are 10+ cents off even if you allow pretty large ratios: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_equal_temperament#/media/Fi...
Integer frequency ratios in chords are probably favoured because of the way overtones line up and make the cilia of the inner ear vibrate
Consider 4'33".
"Universal music cognition" requires a strong exclusionary premise about what counts as music and more importantly what doesn't count as music.
Sure maybe you don't consider 4'33" music. That does not mean other people do not experience it as music in the normal ways people can experience music such as buying tickets, putting on fancy clothes and sitting in a performance space at an appointed time and as an excuse to go out to dinner and/or on a date.
But if your musical interest extends much beyond a Methodist hymnal, there are probably people who will opine that the subject of those interests are not "real" music.
To be clear, I am not opining that *4'33" is or isn't "real" music. Only that in a scientific context, there is no objective way to distinguish between music and non-music. Some cultures have practices that we can label "music" but within the culture they do not play a language game that includes the label "music."
Which is to say that any ecumenical approach to music in a scientific context is so broad as to be meaningless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3
433 was more of a statement/exercise in listening. It's interesting to explore the edges of what counts as music, but in practice, people can tell when something is music made for enjoyment by other people.
Enjoyment is a strong word! Some music is written to share ideas and experiments, so it might not be 'enjoyable' to listen to, but 'interesting' - kind of like the difference between reading a Harry Potter book which is engaging and doesn't ask too much of you, and Spinoza, which requires your full attention.
I think music is more universal than you suggest (or people may think you're suggesting).
Trying to classify things as music is a normative approach - saying what music should be. There's always exceptions to rules, as you point out, and people will always disagree and find exceptions.
The article is a descriptive approach - it studies what people think music is.
You can treat music as information. If it's not information, it's just noise.
Sometimes it has a low information density. People like to sing along to stuff they recognise. Sometimes it has higher density - a surprise bit of syncopation or an unusual note. Music is a variation in pitch and rhythm (etc) that is boring enough (in the context of the priors) to be familiar, but not too boring.
OTOH look at how tone poems flopped. There are patterns that are naturally easier to learn - rhythms (in the article) and maybe scales and harmonies (though this is clearly a bit more complex - not every culture has the old Mesopotamian diatonic scales that the Pythagorians formalised). But like Chomsky theorised with grammar, there might be defaults (or a range of defaults) that humans are naturally drawn to as the priors.
> You can treat music as information. If it's not information, it's just noise.
In information theory we have:
A message has maximal information content if (and only if) its symbols are statistically indistinguishable from random noise.
Noise or noise-like elements are also important part of many kinds of music.
This is why a better acronym for IDM is Information Dense Music, it's less pretentious and it explains why it's very close to noise ;)
Of course, I'd argue Bach and Debussy are very information-dense too but they somehow manage to stay uncluttered. The really great thing about music is that encodes information on many different levels, Claude Shannon notwithstanding
Working in an almost open office, 4 and half minutes of silence is a music to my ears. :-) If anything it should be longer.
This sounds like a potential continuum fallacy.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Argumen...
I forget anyone takes 4'33" seriously.
Imagine a chef making a dish of just an empty plate. It is just stupid. Even the biggest food hipsters wouldn't fall for something that stupid.
At some point one should have listened to enough music in their life to call 4'33" out for the bullshit that it is.
Very interesting problem to even consider. That said, I don’t think we even understand the what, how, and why of music. The rhythm precognition aspect mentioned in another comment makes me think it’s just a byproduct of time and counting with pattern recognition, not necessarily a music thing just a correlation by virtue of physics and the laws of the universe.