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April 6th, 2009 | Posted by

Researchers have proposed numerous hypotheses about why anyone makes music, ranging from emotional communication to group commonality. Other scientists, such as Harvard University linguist John Pinker, have answer that music is just “auditory cheesecake” with no real evolutionary meaning.

If music is the consequence of Darwinian selection, it’s likely that all members of the human species, despite of their culture, will respond to it in alike ways. Yet investigate such cross-cultural musical universals has been very tricky. With increasing globalization, it is nearly not possible to find a Westerner who has not heard Eastern music or an African who hasn’t heard the Beatles. “Someone may say that they have never heard Hindustani music or Japanese Shinto music,” says Laura-Lee Balkwill, a music cognition researcher at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, “but chances are that they have been uncovered to it, on the radio, as background music in a movie or on a Web site, even as someone else’s ringtone.” And that makes it difficult for researchers to differentiate between musical sensibility that might be hard-wired and those that are culturally determined.

The team set up that the Mafas’ ability to identify musical emotions was far better than chance for all three emotional states. Whereas by chance alone they would be unsurprising to properly identify “happy” music one-third of the time, the Mafas properly picked it 60% of the time on average. They properly categorized the other two musical emotions about half the time. Westerners, in contrast, scored 100% with happy music and better than 80% with sad or scared/fearful music, the researchers report online today in Current Biology. The capability of the Mafa to detect different emotions in Western music, the team concludes, is proof that this capacity is universal.

Balkwill says that the result is “a good sign that these widespread associations between music and emotion cannot be dismissed as an artifact of exposure to the music of other cultures.” And Fritz says the results support the hypothesis that music has evolutionary meaning: “There is no doubt that music is a key part of what makes us human.”