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Updated: Jan 3, 2026

Eliciting and Analyzing Male Mouse Ultrasonic Vocalization USV Songs
Published on: May 9, 2017
Universality and diversity in human song
Samuel A Mehr1,2,3, Manvir Singh4, Dean Knox5
1Data Science Initiative, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. sam@wjh.harvard.edu manvirsingh@fas.harvard.edu glowacki@psu.edu.
Abstract:
What is universal about music, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world's societies, as well as a discography of audio recordings. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music (including songs with words) appears in every society observed; that music varies along three dimensions (formality, arousal, religiosity), more within societies than across them; and that music is associated with certain behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography-analyzed through machine summaries, amateur and expert listener ratings, and manual transcriptions-reveals that acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral context; that tonality is widespread, perhaps universal; that music varies in rhythmic and melodic complexity; and that elements of melodies and rhythms found worldwide follow power laws.
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