Automatic comparison of human music, speech, and bird song suggests uniqueness of human scales

The uniqueness of human music relative to speech and animal song has been extensively debated, but rarely directly measured. We applied an automated scale analysis algorithm to a sample of 86 recordings of human music, human speech, and bird songs from around the world. We found that human music thr...

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Hauptverfasser: Kuroyanagi, Jiei, Sato, Shoichiro, Ho, Meng-Jou, Chiba, Gakuto, Six, Joren, Pfordresher, Peter, Tierney, Adam, Fujii, Shinya, Savage, Patrick
Format: Tagungsbericht
Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:The uniqueness of human music relative to speech and animal song has been extensively debated, but rarely directly measured. We applied an automated scale analysis algorithm to a sample of 86 recordings of human music, human speech, and bird songs from around the world. We found that human music throughout the world uniquely emphasized scales with small-integer frequency ratios, particularly a perfect 5th (3:2 ratio), while human speech and bird song showed no clear evidence of consistent scale-like tunings. We speculate that the uniquely human tendency toward scales with small-integer ratios may relate to the evolution of synchronized group performance among humans.