What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? (2024)
6 comments
·November 25, 2025brudgers
Uhhrrr
433 was more of a statement/exercise in listening. It's interesting to explore the edges of what counts as music, but in practice, people can tell when something is music made for enjoyment by other people.
wisty
I think music is more universal than you suggest (or people may think you're suggesting).
Trying to classify things as music is a normative approach - saying what music should be. There's always exceptions to rules, as you point out, and people will always disagree and find exceptions.
The article is a descriptive approach - it studies what people think music is.
You can treat music as information. If it's not information, it's just noise.
Sometimes it has a low information density. People like to sing along to stuff they recognise. Sometimes it has higher density - a surprise bit of syncopation or an unusual note. Music is a variation in pitch and rhythm (etc) that is boring enough (in the context of the priors) to be familiar, but not too boring.
OTOH look at how tone poems flopped. There are patterns that are naturally easier to learn - rhythms (in the article) and maybe scales and harmonies (though this is clearly a bit more complex - not every culture has the old Mesopotamian diatonic scales that the Pythagorians formalised). But like Chomsky theorised with grammar, there might be defaults (or a range of defaults) that humans are naturally drawn to as the priors.
js8
Working in an almost open office, 4 and half minutes of silence is a music to my ears. :-) If anything it should be longer.
nelox
Humans everywhere seem wired to favour simple integer-ratio rhythms, but culture tweaks which rhythms become “natural.” This suggests a shared rhythm cognition backbone, yet enough flexibility to account for global musical diversity. The study is a solid counter to the claim that music structure is purely learned or arbitrary, while also showing culture doesn’t just ride on biology: it shapes what we actually use.
If you’re into music cognition, evolution of culture, or cognitive universals vs cultural diversity, this is the kind of data you want to see.
dr_dshiv
And a strong tendency for integer ratios in chords. So is this about compressibility?
Consider 4'33".
"Universal music cognition" requires a strong exclusionary premise about what counts as music and more importantly what doesn't count as music.
Sure maybe you don't consider 4'33" music. That does not mean other people do not experience it as music in the normal ways people can experience music such as buying tickets, putting on fancy clothes and sitting in a performance space at an appointed time and as an excuse to go out to dinner and/or on a date.
But if your musical interest extends much beyond a Methodist hymnal, there are probably people who will opine that the subject of those interests are not "real" music.
To be clear, I am not opining that *4'33" is or isn't "real" music. Only that in a scientific context, there is no objective way to distinguish between music and non-music. Some cultures have practices that we can label "music" but within the culture they do not play a language game that includes the label "music."
Which is to say that any ecumenical approach to music in a scientific context is so broad as to be meaningless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3