Music is a universal language, shows study

Music and art, musicians always tell us, transcends boundaries and cultures. Now science agrees. The underlying structures and melodic elements of songs are similar across the world, a new study finds.

Published in the Science, the study found that the same patterns of rhythm repeats itself. Researchers studied 315 cultures for several years, examining their collection of traditional and new songs. The comprehensive database of songs they compiled has been called ‘The Natural History of Song.’

"We are so used to being able to find any piece of music that we like on the internet," said psychologist Samuel Mehr at the Harvard University.

They collected a total of 118 songs from 86 cultures, spanning 30 regions.

"Lullabies and dance songs are ubiquitous and they are also highly stereotyped," said Manvir Singh, the evolutionary biologist at Harvard. There could be something in our brains that helps us understand music on a universal level, the researchers also concluded.

"Musical idioms differ with respect to which acoustic features they use and which emotions they engage, but they all draw from a common suite of psychological responses to sound," the scientist wrote in their study.