Very little. But a new study points to opportunities to learn more.

A few notes on this new and controversial work on music in Science from a mere performer who has an outsize interest in such questions (caveat emptor). For an overview, read these two Twitter threads by two of the authors first:

To consider a few of the claims here, let’s take a step back and review: There have historically been a variety of studies investigating music’s foundations conducted by scientists and other academics of various stripes, rather than by musicologists and music scholars of other kinds. 

More recently, there has been a particular species of the above that purports to leverage computational science to get at these questions. My general opinion of those efforts so far has been pretty low. Vastly over-simplifying, but at the core, we get something like, “I fed a bunch of data about music into a spreadsheet, herr durrr, check out my rad charts and tables...” - and if it was a high profile study, the PR machine of the Fancy Sheltering Institution goes into overdrive making outlandish claims about “cracking the code” to music, or what have you, and of course Newsweek and the rest of the MSM are happy to run with it (where scholarship meets capitalism). Going beyond the headlines, most of that is pretty low quality, and reveals colonialist biases at every level. It often will use transparently bad frames that any 1st year grad student could probably pick apart.

Quite recently, though, there have been some studies which seem to have fared much better, and this new study, “Universality and Diversity in Human Song” by Mehr, Sing..., is one of those. Are they perfect? No. Is there a long way to go? Yes. Do I have my problems with this study? Yes. But it is a stimulating work and worthy of taking the time to engage meaningfully with what is claimed. 

Judging from Twitter, the most offensive claim seems to be the universality claim. And, it really doesn’t help that everyone immediately resorts to the old Longfellow chestnut, “Music is the universal language of mankind,” when describing it in the press. (Edit: I scanned right past the fact that the authors themselves chose to begin here, and chose to consciously elide the last 50 years of ethnomusicology, which doesn’t help.)

I am, again, not a musicologist by training, and I would invite the great musicologists in my circle to instruct me where I err. But the reason Longfellow is a problem is because Longfellow does not mean the same thing that Mehr, Singh, et al. mean in this paper. (Which is unfortunate, again, given that they chose to open their paper with it.)

Backing up for a further note of explanation: some of the best coursework in my student career was under ethnomusicologists at Texas Tech and (believe it or not) Peabody. That work occupies a vastly outsize mindshare in my worldview as a musician and has made me a much better teacher, especially in my western music survey. In my classes as a student, I was forced to reconsider what music *is* and asked to begin to consider (perhaps more interestingly) what it *does* in a given context. It was all a part of pushback against this colonialist notion voiced here by Longfellow, but made into academic reality by Adler.

Therefore, when Longfellow says “music,” he means western art music of the common practice period, the kind he would be familiar with, and not the vast space that music now occupies in 2019. And when Longfellow claims that it is, “the universal language,” he predicts the awful spate of westerners traipsing into remote villages with phonographs of Beethoven and apocryphally claiming that the locals were moved by it. Sadly, these claims are still in the cultural groundwater from which we all drink, so it becomes necessary to instruct university music students otherwise, something I now have the privilege of doing myself.

So, I understand why the dander begins to fly. However, going beneath the clickbaity headlines, I don’t think this paper is attempting to say anything quite as bold as the thing musicologists rightly push back against. Their work, right in the title, makes it clear that, essentially, they are looking for commonalities and (critically) differences between cultures and musics (universality and diversity). This is a far less bold stance and one that invites caveat and nuance (and serious consideration) at every turn. It’s also important to note the vast difference between claiming “music is the universal language” (it’s not), and claiming that “music is universal” (far less lofty).

I don’t agree with everything I am reading (another word problem: there is no way that “tonality” is being used in a conventional way in this paper, and becomes a stumbling block when presented without asterisk) but I will just say that this appears to be substantially better work than the previous generation of “data set music scholarship” and some compelling claims are made and supported that are worthy of deep engagement. 

Perhaps there are musicologists who are already composing strong rebuttals that will dismiss even my tepid endorsement and dismantle this paper, root and branch. But, if that’s the case, my hope is that the process will cause musicians of all stripes to sharpen up our arguments about music’s position in the cosmos and in our culture. If the scholarship below does nothing more, it will be a success.