In two recent studies, researchers have found clues to suggest that the link between music and language is not entirely straightforward.
A research article published today in Science Advances compared songs and speech from different global cultures. Yuto Ozaki and Patrick Savage from Keio University in Japan collaborated with a large international research team to analyze recordings of songs, melodies and speech from over 50 languages around the world.
By considering many different languages and music cultures, they could study how features of speech and music compare regardless of differences between languages or music styles. Across the board, they found that songs and instrumental melodies were slower and higher pitched than speech. Why this is the case is not yet clear, but Savage suspects that one of the reasons music is more predictable and regular than speech could be because it could act as a social bonding method.
In total, 75 researchers were involved in this study, who each contributed audio of them speaking and singing (or otherwise making music). Savage didn’t have much trouble convincing his music researcher colleagues to sing. Most of them had fun in the process, and Savage enjoyed going through this unusual set of research data. “I have downloaded all of their singing and speaking onto my phone,” he says. “And sometimes I just put it on shuffle as I’m walking around. I really love listening to their songs.”
Savage himself represented the English language with the song “Scarborough Fair”, while Ozaki sang “Ōmori Jinku”, a Japanese folk song from the Tokyo area. The many other researchers involved in the study contributed recordings in Māori, Yoruba, Cherokee, Hebrew, Mandarin, Arabic and several other languages.
Even though the study was very broad in its coverage, it wasn’t possible to include more than a few samples per language or music culture, so more in-depth studies are still needed.
Meanwhile, Savage was also involved in a research project with Sam Passmore of the Australian National University (ANU) and others, in which they used the “Global Jukebox”. This is a database of over five thousand songs, each annotated with information about music style as well as geographic information. They compared data from the Global Jukebox with databases that record genetic diversity or diversity in languages over different regions.
Genetics and language analysis are often used to study how human societies evolved and spread across the world. For example, cultures that diverged more recently will have languages that are more similar to each other than cultures that split from each other much longer ago.
But music evolves over time as well, just like languages and genes do. By analyzing the Global Jukebox database, lead researcher Passmore was hoping to find out if musical evolution aligns with that of language and genetics. “What we learned is that musical history often diverges from language and genetic history and that it may be more aligned with other markers such as social organization,” Passmore said in a statement to ANU.
Together, these two new studies are starting to reveal how music plays a part in cultures around the world, and where it overlaps with or differs from languages. It’s clearly a complex relationship.
