Humans across the world dance to the same beat

Songs from around the world tend to share features, including a strong rhythm, that enable coordination in social situations and encourage group bonding, a new study has found.
Despite decades of scepticism about the presence of cross-culturally universal aspects of music, the study provides strong evidence for the existence of common features in global music.
The finding supports the idea that music is a powerful social glue that helps bond societies together.
"Our findings help explain why humans make music," Dr Thomas Currie from the University of Exeter in UK said.
"The results show that the most common features seen in music around the world relate to things that allow people to coordinate their actions, and suggest that the main function of music is to bring people together and bond social groups - it can be a kind of social glue," said Currie.

"In the West we can sometimes think of music as being about individuals expressing themselves or displaying their talent, but globally music tends to be more of social phenomena," he said.

The researchers analysed 304 recordings of stylistically diverse music from across the world to reveal the common features.
Although they found no absolute universals, they found dozens of statistical universals (ie, features that were consistently present in a majority of songs across different world regions).
These included features related to pitch and rhythm as well as social context and interrelationships between musical features.
The results showed that rhythms based on two or three beats were present in music from all regions sampled - North America, Central/South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania.

"In the old days, Western people believed that Western scales were universal," said lead author Pat Savage, a PhD student from the Tokyo University of the Arts.
"But then when we realised that other cultures had quite different ideas about scales, that led some people to conclude that there was nothing universal about music, which I think is just as silly.
"Now we've shown that despite its great surface diversity, most of the music throughout the world is actually constructed from very similar basic building blocks and performs very similar functions, which mainly revolve around bringing people together," he added.

The research was published in the journal PNAS.