Nori Jacoby, Rainer Polak, Jessica A Grahn, Daniel J Cameron, Kyung Myun Lee, Ricardo Godoy, Eduardo A Undurraga, Tomás Huanca, Timon Thalwitzer, Noumouké Doumbia, Daniel Goldberg, Elizabeth H Margulis, Patrick C M Wong, Luis Jure, Martín Rocamora, Shinya Fujii, Patrick E Savage, Jun Ajimi, Rei Konno, Sho Oishi, Kelly Jakubowski, Andre Holzapfel, Esra Mungan, Ece Kaya, Preeti Rao, Mattur A Rohit, Suvarna Alladi, Bronwyn Tarr, Manuel Anglada-Tort, Peter M C Harrison, Malinda J McPherson, Sophie Dolan, Alex Durango, Josh H McDermott
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...
March 4, 2024: Nature Human Behaviour