Universality and diversity in human song

Science • Vol/Iss. 366(6468) • American Association for the Advancement of Science • Washington, D.C. • Published In • Pages: eaax0868 •
By Mehr, Samuel A., Singh, Manvir, Knox, Dean, Ketter, Daniel M., Pickens-Jones, Daniel, Atwood, S., Lucas, Christopher, Jacoby, Nori, Egner, Alena A., Hopkins, Erin J., Howard, Rhea M., Hartshorne, Joshua K., Jennings, Mariela V., Simson, Jan, Bainbridge, Constance M., Pinker, Steven, O’Donnell, Timothy J., Krasnow, Max M., Glowacki, Luke

Hypothesis

Similar patterns of song variations (within the categories of formality, arousal, and religiosity) can be applied to all societies.

Note

Density plots were created for all of the societies except for Tzeltal. Check figure 3 within the body of the paper for a list of all of the plots and subsequent significant relationships. Although there were societies that reported significant variation outside of the global mean, they were the minority. In addition to the density tests, the within- to between-society variances were 5.58 for Formality (95% Bayesian credible interval [4.11, 6.95]); 6.39 [4.72, 8.34] for Arousal; and 6.21 [4.47, 7.94] for Religiosity. None of the 180 mean values for the 60 societies over the 3 dimensions deviated from the global mean by more than 1.96 times the standard deviation of that society.

Test

Test NameSupportSignificanceCoefficientTail
UNKNOWNPartially SupportedUNKNOWNUNKNOWNUNKNOWN