Gustavo-Fring / Pexels
The concept of love songs varied greatly between listeners from 49 countriesGustavo-Fring / PexelsMusic as a language is generally understood in the same way by listeners from different cultures, suggests a study by researchers from Yale University, USA, that involved 5,600 people from 49 countries who speak 31 different languages. Each participant listened to 18 to 24 excerpts of 118 songs composed in 75 different languages. They were then asked to indicate their level of certainty regarding which of four categories each song best fit into: music to make the listener sleepy, to dance to, for healing, or for expressing love. In the first three categories, the level of accuracy was higher than would be expected if the choices had been made at random. The results suggest that these types of songs share universal acoustic characteristics, allowing listeners from any culture to recognize what they were written for—dance songs tend to be loud and rhythmic, for example, while lullabies are usually low and melodic. The exception was love songs, probably because they are used to express both happiness and sadness, or jealousy. “Listeners who heard love songs from neighboring countries and in languages related to their own actually did a little better, likely because of the familiar linguistic and cultural clues,” said Lidya Yurdum, lead author of the study, in a press release (PNAS and YaleNews, September 7).
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