Music Across the World

• The National History of Song (Mehr et al. 2019) - An index of ethnographic writings of global vocal traditions

• Formality • Arousal • Religiosity

Dance songs, healing songs, love songs and lullabies

• Dance songs have a faster tempo • Dance and healing song had more differentiated accents than a lullaby • Healing songs are mostly stepwise • Love songs vary in interval sizes

When two cultures share features due to parent-child cultural relationships like colonial/imperial rule or geographical proximity

• Isochronous beat • Few durational values • Use of percussion instruments • Motivic patterns and phrase repetitions • Syllabic text setting

A feature that recurs across a data set at least 50% of the time

• Small and stepwise intervals that are easier to manoeuvre • Late phrase compression and pitch decline as lungs run out of breath • Lower register expels less energy and effort

• Patterns are multiple time scales (motives > phrases > stanzas) • Repetition • Phrase contour • Non-equidistant scales (easier to remember as each note has a distinct relationship to its adjacent)

• Syllabic word setting can mirror the rhythms of local dialect • Pitch inflects mirror melodic contour of a phrase

Must reverse direction once upper limit reached and return to a comfortable range

• A lab experiment method involved exploring evolutionary possibilities of a musical excerpt • Simulates oral transmission of musical styles • Participant pass on a melody like Chinese whispers to see the degree of variation in the final product

• Pitch: Discrete pitches, non-equidistant scales, arched/descending contour • Rhythm: isochronous beat, 2 (and 3) beat groupings, hierarchical organisation • Form: Short phrases • Instrumentation: Vocals using non-vocal accompaniment • Performance Style: Words > nonsense syllables • Social context: performed in groups and mostly by men