Data Science Initiative, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Science. 2019 Nov 22;366(6468). doi: 10.1126/science.aax0868.
What is universal about music, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world's societies, as well as a discography of audio recordings. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music (including songs with words) appears in every society observed; that music varies along three dimensions (formality, arousal, religiosity), more within societies than across them; and that music is associated with certain behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography-analyzed through machine summaries, amateur and expert listener ratings, and manual transcriptions-reveals that acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral context; that tonality is widespread, perhaps universal; that music varies in rhythmic and melodic complexity; and that elements of melodies and rhythms found worldwide follow power laws.
音乐具有哪些普遍性，又有哪些变化？我们构建了一个包含世界各社会群体音乐行为的民族志文本语料库和一个音频记录唱片目录。民族志语料库揭示了以下几点：在观察到的每一个社会中，都存在音乐（包括有歌词的歌曲）；音乐在三个维度（正式程度、兴奋程度、宗教虔诚度）上存在变化，在社会内部的变化大于社会之间的变化；音乐与某些行为情境相关联，如婴儿护理、治疗、舞蹈和爱情。通过机器总结、业余和专业听众评分以及手动转录对唱片目录进行的分析揭示了歌曲的音响特征可以预测其主要行为情境；调性很普遍，也许是普遍存在的；音乐在节奏和旋律复杂度上存在变化；并且在世界范围内发现的旋律和节奏元素都遵循幂律。
