“The most striking thing to me is how they found these incredibly clear universals across these two cultures,” says Samuel Mehr, a researcher at Harvard University who studies music from around the world. The Tsimane’ have the same upper limit as Westerners, researchers found, even though their musical instruments tend to top out at lower frequencies. Above that, the notes become too tinny to discern the difference.
Even though humans can hear frequencies of up to 20,000 Hz, most Western instruments have an upper limit of about 4,000 Hz. What the researchers found most surprising, however, were not the differences, but the similarities. Because Tsimane’ musicians aren’t required to harmonize with each other, they may have never developed an ear for octaves. Tsimane’ music, they note, is typically performed solo. The researchers suspect that these differences in perception arise as a result of the music that we’re exposed to. McDermott and his colleagues found, they sound equally pleasant. To Westerners an interval of seven half steps played together (C and G, for instance) sounds pleasing, while an interval of three whole steps (say, C and F#) sounds harsh. McDermott is also the author of a 2016 paper in Nature that found that the Tsimane’ had different perceptions of consonance and dissonance than Westerners. “There are these natural mathematical relationships that exist, and that probably does predispose musical systems in various ways.”īut, he says, “those relationships don’t really seem to be evident to people unless they engage with one of those musical systems.” Music to whose ears?ĭr. “There is something very special about the octave in terms of acoustics and biology,” says Josh McDermott, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and one of the paper’s authors. But we only become attuned to this relationship, they say, through exposure to certain kinds of music. The A above it is 880 Hz and the A below it is 220. The A above middle C, widely used as concert pitch, is 440 hertz. The authors point out that there is indeed an objective physical relationship between notes separated by octaves: Every note is double the frequency of the note one octave below it. The question is within the more refined details.” “The question is not whether it’s either-or. “When you look at human behavior, on the one hand you see commonality, on the other hand you see differences,” says Nori Jacoby, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany, and the study’s lead author. The research offers a glimpse at the perplexing and often counterintuitive ways that nature and nurture play off one another. A study published last week in Current Biology takes aim at the taken-for-grantedness of octave equivalence.
Alternatively, given the vast range of musical systems across cultures, it’s also tempting to see all music as culturally contingent.īut it might actually be more complicated than that. When we think of it at all, it’s tempting to see it as natural, something encoded into the physics of acoustics and hardwired into the biology of human hearing.Įvery known human culture produces music, and it’s tempting to focus only on the universal elements, to see music purely as a matter of biology. Octave equivalence – that unshakable feeling that notes separated by an octave are really the “same” note – is such a fundamental feature of our music that it’s nearly invisible. When it comes to music, scientists are finding that acoustics, biology, and culture interact in complex ways. Nature versus nurture: It's not an either-or proposition.
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