Computational Auditory Perception Group, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
Nat Hum Behav. 2024 May;8(5):846-877. doi: 10.1038/s41562-023-01800-9. Epub 2024 Mar 4.
Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random 'seed' rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of 'telephone'), such that their biases (the prior) could be estimated from the distribution of reproductions. Every tested group showed a sparse prior with peaks at integer-ratio rhythms. However, the importance of different integer ratios varied across groups, often reflecting local musical practices. Our results suggest a common feature of music cognition: discrete rhythm 'categories' at small-integer ratios. These discrete representations plausibly stabilize musical systems in the face of cultural transmission but interact with culture-specific traditions to yield the diversity that is evident when mental representations are probed across many cultures.
音乐存在于每一个已知的社会中，但在不同的地方有所不同。如果有任何东西是音乐认知普遍存在的，那会是什么呢？我们在 15 个国家的 39 个参与者群体中测量了节奏的心理表现的特征，这些群体涵盖了城市社会和原住民群体。听众复制随机的“种子”节奏；他们的复制作为刺激反馈（就像在“电话”游戏中一样），这样他们的偏差（先验）可以从复制的分布中估计出来。每个测试组都显示出稀疏的先验，峰值出现在整数比的节奏上。然而，不同整数比的重要性在不同的群体中有所不同，这通常反映了当地的音乐实践。我们的结果表明音乐认知存在一个共同的特征：小整数比的离散节奏“类别”。这些离散的表示形式在面对文化传播时可能会稳定音乐系统，但会与特定于文化的传统相互作用，从而产生在跨许多文化进行心理表现探测时明显的多样性。
