Mutual intelligibility in musical communication

Despite the variability of music across cultures, some types of human songs share acoustic characteristics with one another. For example, dance songs tend to be loud and rhythmic and lullabies tend to be quiet and melodious. Human perceptual sensitivity to the behavioural contexts of songs on the basis of these acoustic features raises the possibility that basic properties of music are mutually intelligible, independent of linguistic or cultural content. Whether these effects reflect a universal perceptual phenomenon, however, is unclear, because prior studies focus almost exclusively on English-speaking participants, a group that is not representative of humans, writ large. Here we report shared intuitions concerning the behavioural contexts of unfamiliar songs produced in unfamiliar languages, in participants living in Internet-connected industrialised societies (n = 5, 516 native speakers of 28 languages) or smaller-scale societies with limited access to global media (n = 116 native speakers of 3 non-English languages). Participants listened to songs randomly selected from a representative sample of human vocal music, originally used in four behavioural contexts, and rated the degree to which they believed the song was used for each context. Listeners in both industrialised and smaller-scale societies reliably inferred the contexts of dance songs, lullabies, and healing songs, but not love songs. Within and across the cohorts, inferences were mutually consistent. Further, increased linguistic or geographical proximity between listeners and singers only minimally increased the accuracy of the inferences. These results demonstrate that the behavioural contexts of three common forms of music are mutually intelligible across cultures and imply that musical diversity, shaped by cultural evolution, is nonetheless grounded in some universal principles.