19 November 2019, Music Cognition Reading Group

After a break, we are continuing the Music Cognition Reading Group with an exciting paper to be published in Science next week: Universality and diversity in human song (10.31234/osf.io/emq8r). This is the result of the Natural History of Song project, in which Samuel Mehr and many collegues collected a large sample of audio recordings and ethnographic descriptions of the world's musics. Remarkably, it is the first study to systematically check whether music is indeed present in all cultures (spoiler: it is). And that's just the beginning. The paper goes on to map the variation found in those musics, reporting lots of diversity — and some potential universals...

To find out more, feel free to join. You can bring your lunch, if you like.