Universals

Abstract

Musical universals generally refer to aspects of music that are common across humankind, as opposed to aspects that are culture-specific. The existence of musical universals has implications for diverse areas, such as evolution, aesthetics, and cross-cultural understanding, and has thus been a major focus of debate in ethnomusicology and related disciplines. For reasons of space and expertise, this article focuses on debates about musical universals in the mainstream ethnomusicological canon and their broader connections with concepts of human universals in the Western academic tradition, without intending to diminish the value of alternative approaches developed outside of these traditions. Scale tunings and other aspects of pitch structure were long assumed to be universal. During the 20th century, ethnomusicology embraced relativism, emphasizing cross-cultural differences in musical meaning and behavior. However, a 21st century renewal of interest by music psychologists has seen a return to an empirical middle-ground that seeks to move beyond universal/relative dichotomies. Instead, recent research attempts to characterize the degrees to which different aspects of music are more or less common cross-culturally, and to understand the biological and cultural factors underlying this spectrum. Existing evidence suggests a statistically universal set of basic building blocks that may reflect pan-human biological constraints, but each culture may combine and develop these building blocks in unique ways to construct music that can mean different things to different listeners.

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The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music
and Culture
Universals
Contributors: Patrick E. Savage
Edited by: Janet Sturman
Book Title: The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture
Chapter Title: "Universals"
Pub. Date: 2019
Access Date: May 7, 2019
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks,
Print ISBN: 9781483317755
Online ISBN: 9781483317731
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483317731.n759
Print pages: 2283-2285
© 2019 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online
version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

Musical universals generally refer to aspects of music that are common across humankind, as opposed to
aspects that are culturally specific. The existence of musical universals has implications for diverse areas,
such as evolution, aesthetics, and cross-cultural understanding and has thus been a major focus of debate
in ethnomusicology and related disciplines. For reasons of space and expertise, this entry focuses on de-
bates about musical universals in the mainstream ethnomusicological canon and their broader connections
with concepts of human universals in the Western academic tradition, without intending to diminish the value
of alternative approaches developed outside of these traditions.
Scale tunings and other aspects of pitch structure were long assumed to be universal. During the 20th century,
ethnomusicology embraced relativism, emphasizing cross-cultural differences in musical meaning and be-
havior. However, a 21st-century renewal of interest by music psychologists has seen a return to an empirical
middle ground that seeks to move beyond universal/relative dichotomies. Instead, recent research attempts
to characterize the degrees to which different aspects of music are more or less common cross-culturally and
to understand the biological and cultural factors underlying this spectrum. Existing evidence suggests a statis-
tically universal set of basic building blocks that may reflect panhuman biological constraints, but each culture
may combine and develop these building blocks in unique ways to construct music that can mean different
things to different listeners. This entry examines the historical debate over musical universals and types and
degrees of musical universals.
Historical Debate Over Musical Universals
The concept of universals has been debated for millennia and continues in contemporary “nature versus nur-
ture” debates. From at least the 3rd century B.C.E., Plato’s proposal of universal conceptions of knowledge
present at birth was challenged by Aristotle’s vision of the mind as a blank tablet (De Anima) modified by later
experience.
Earlier still, Pythagoras proposed a model of musical tuning based on universal mathematical principles.
Pythagoras showed that if three strings are plucked and the lengths of the second and third strings are re-
spectively 1/2 and 1/3 the lengths of the first, the interval between the first and second strings will be an
octave and the interval between the second and third will be a perfect fifth. Pythagorean integer ratios thus
imply a mathematical foundation for a universal basis for musical scales. Similar observations were made in
other ancient Eurasian civilizations such as China and India.
After Columbus’s voyage to the New World opened an era of colonialism, Western scholars began to be in-
creasingly exposed to and interested in the music and cultures of non-Western peoples. Sometimes, this re-
sulted in romantic ideas of universals bringing peoples together, as in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s idea of
music as “the universal language of mankind.” Other times, this was reflected through racism and ethnocen-
trism.
With the rise of nationalism in the 19th century, there was increasing pressure to show that one’s own culture
was superior. In the late 19th century-German environment in which academic musicology was born, this was
reflected in an emphasis on the naturalness of German art music. Thus, emerging evidence of cross-cultural
differences was often dismissed either as mistakes or as inferior products of primitive cultures at an earlier
evolutionary stage.
Much of the early debate around musical universals revolved around pitch structures related to scale into-
nation and harmony. During the 17th through 19th centuries, a series of scholars, including Jean-Philippe
Rameau and Hermann von Helmholtz, developed Pythagoras’s ideas about simple integer ratios into a theory
of consonance based on the harmonic overtone series. Not only do strings of different lengths vibrate at differ-
ent frequencies but also any vibrating object produces the fundamental frequency we hear and also a series
of overtones that appear at integer ratios above the fundamental frequency (i.e., the first overtone appears
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one octave above the fundamental frequency, the second appears a perfect fifth above that, etc.). When mul-
tiple pitches are played together as chords, the harmonics of each pitch interfere with one another to different
degrees depending on how similar their harmonic series are, such that consonant octaves and perfect fifths
have minimal harmonic interference, while dissonant seconds and sevenths have high levels of interference.
The first major challenge to the paradigm of musical universals was Alexander Ellis’s On the Musical Scales
of Various Nations (1885). Ellis developed a method of precisely measuring musical intervals in cents (100
cents per semitone) and took advantage of increasing access to non-Western instruments and musicians to
empirically measure the tunings of dozens of instruments from various cultures throughout Eurasia. Although
there were some tunings that were relatively consistent cross-culturally—particularly the octave, fourth, and
fifth—many intervals did not correspond to Western conceptions of a 12-note semitone scale, and even the
perfect fourth and fifth were violated by a Javanese gamelan. Ellis presented this as a fundamental challenge
to universal theories of pitch structure. He concluded that there exists not a single or natural musical scale
but rather diverse scales. In his own words: “the Musical Scale is not one, not ‘natural,’ nor even founded
necessarily on the laws of the constitution of musical sound so beautifully worked out by Helmholtz, but very
diverse, very artificial, and very capricious” (p. 526).
Ellis’s empirical approach to the question of musical universals was widely adopted by the Berlin School of
comparative musicologists, including Carl Stumpf, Erich von Hornbostel, and Curt Sachs, who began to as-
semble and compare large collections of recordings and instruments from around the world. Comparative
musicologists continued to be interested primarily in pitch structures, with Hornbostel proposing a cycle of
blown fifths to explain regional discrepancies in tuning.
After World War II, there was a rapid movement away from the universalist approaches of German compar-
ative musicologists to embrace concepts of cultural relativism developed by American anthropologists led by
Franz Boas. Unlike the armchair approach of comparative musicologists, Boasian anthropologists empha-
sized the importance of understanding cultures on their own terms by immersing oneself in them through
extended fieldwork. Boas and his students, including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Melville Herskovits,
used counterexamples from their fieldwork to challenge many concepts that were assumed to be universal,
including social roles such as gender and cognitive processes such as color classification.
Herskovits in turn taught Alan Merriam, one of the founders of the Society for Ethnomusicology, whose book
The Anthropology of Music (1964) marked a turning point in ethnomusicology. While earlier comparative mu-
sicology had generally focused on scales, rhythms, and other acoustic structures that could be recorded,
notated, and analyzed from afar, Merriam proposed a three-part model to the study of music in culture that
included the domains of musical behavior and concept in addition to the traditional domain of musical sound.
Merriam and his contemporaries, such as John Blacking, were critical of the idea of music as a universal
language because even if there were certain cross-cultural similarities in acoustic structures, these did not
necessarily communicate the same meanings to their audiences. For example, although thāt (parent scales)
in classical Indian music theory overlap with Western modes, they do not share the happy/sad associations
of the Western major/minor distinction, but instead different rāga created from each thāt are associated with
different times of day or seasons. Furthermore, not all listeners respond in the same way even within these
cultures—a piece that makes one listener feel happy may make another listener feel sad because it reminds
him or her of a lost loved one.
In the ensuing decades, the concept of universals was debated vigorously by many of the leading figures in
the field of ethnomusicology. While there was a range of opinions, the overall tendency was of skepticism to-
ward the usefulness of the concept of universals (the most notable exception coming from Alan Lomax, who
argued based on data from his Cantometrics Project for universal relationships between singing style and so-
cial structure).
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At the beginning of the 21st century, the concept of universals began to gain favor again, spurred in part by
the 2001 publication of the first human genome and the confirmation that humans throughout the world have
basically the same genetic code. Earlier linguistic research on language universals and universal grammar
by Joseph Greenberg and Noam Chomsky became popular in anthropology and evolutionary psychology as
ways of conceptualizing a universal human nature characterized by an adapted mind.
This renewed interest in universals led to a new generation of psychologists such as Steven Brown and
Aniruddh Patel interested in the ways music may help our understanding of human evolution, partly due to
the many similarities and differences between music, language, and nonmusical arts. Drawing on inspiration
both from earlier comparative musicologists and from later ethnomusicologists such as Bruno Nettl, Brown
and ethnomusicologist Joseph Jordania published Universals in the World’s Musics (2013), listing 70 puta-
tively universal features of music spanning not only acoustic domains such as pitch and rhythm but also non-
acoustic domains of behavior and concept. Brown’s student, Patrick Savage, subsequently led an interdisci-
plinary attempt to empirically test many of these 70 features on a global sample of 304 recordings, publishing
evidence for many statistical universals in Statistical Universals Reveal the Structures and Functions of Hu-
man Music (2015).
Types and Degrees of Musical Universals
Much of the confusion revolving around the universals debates involves the varying ways in which universals
are defined and conceptualized. For instance, many ethnomusicologists believe in the universal communica-
tive power of music, but dislike the description of music as a universal language because it implies a di-
rect translation of musical sound to meaning that does not hold even for individuals within the same culture,
let alone cross-culturally. Questions about musical universals are intrinsically linked to unresolved questions
about how to define music. Although all cultures seem to have something comparable to the Western concept
of music, many don’t have a single term that translates directly. For example, the Persian word musiqi, al-
though it shares the same historical roots as the English word “music,” refers primarily to instrumental music
and specifically excludes sung Qur’an recitation that many Westerners consider musical.
Another terminological problem involves defining where to draw the line between absolute universals, statis-
tical universals, and culturally specific features. Few, if any, aspects of music are likely to be absolute uni-
versals if we accept compositions such as John Cage’s 4'33' (which consists of a person sitting silently at
a piano) as music. Even within more traditional musical cultures, it is usually possible to find exceptions to
many of the most commonly cited universals—some ritual music in Papua New Guinea uses neither discrete
pitches nor discrete meters, and some people simply cannot hear music. Defining as universal any aspect
that is present somewhere within a culture leads to further difficulties in defining what constitutes a culture
and how frequent a feature needs to be within a culture to qualify as present.
On the other hand, if universals are conceptualized statistically based simply on numerical predominance or
correlation, then it becomes necessary to control for the historical effects of cultural diffusion and contact (a
challenge known in anthropology as Galton’s problem). Otherwise, one might be led to identify Indo-European
languages or Western pop music as universal because they are now globally dominant, although this global
spread simply reflects the recent spread of Western people and culture through colonialism and globalization.
There is still no perfect way of controlling for such effects, but anthropologists such as George Murdock have
tried to mitigate them through regional sampling strategies since the mid-20th century. In the 21st century,
scientists studying cultural evolution, such as Mark Pagel and Ruth Mace, have also adopted phylogenet-
ic comparative methods originally developed by evolutionary biologists to control for historical relationships
among species.
Savage and colleagues utilized both regional sampling and phylogenetic comparative methods to identify 18
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statistically universal features of music. These features spanned various domains, including pitch (e.g., scales
consisting of seven or fewer discrete pitch classes), rhythm (e.g., duple meters), form (e.g., short phrases
less than 9 seconds long), instrumentation (e.g., vocal music), performance style (e.g., chest voice), and so-
cial context (e.g., performance in groups and by males). In addition to finding individual features that were
statistically universal, they also found statistically universal relationships between 10 different features (e.g.,
dancing, percussion, and repetitive motifs and phrases are all more likely to appear in group music containing
a regular beat).
Many universals are likely to have low-level explanations. For example, phrase length is presumably limited
at least in part by basic constraints on lung capacity shared with speech and animal vocalizations. Others,
such as the tendency to perform in synchronized groups, are more specific to human music and may thus re-
flect biological adaptations for music. Yet universals do not necessarily imply direct biological causation—the
global dominance of male musicians in public performances is unlikely to be due to innate differences in mu-
sicality, but rather to widespread patriarchal restrictions on female performance.
Ultimately, limited evidence exists for which aspects of music are more or less common cross-culturally and
why that might be. Many of the most interesting putative universals regarding musical behaviors and concepts
(e.g., mode/emotion associations, religious/ritual functions) are hardest to explore because they require an
understanding of the interactions between the psychoacoustic, biological, and social mechanisms that may
facilitate them. Growing interest in interdisciplinary collaboration between ethnomusicology and the sciences
gives hope for more nuanced studies of such mechanisms that go beyond universal/relative dichotomies.
Even after millennia of debate, musical universals remain a fruitful avenue for the study of music and culture
today.
See also Anthropology and Ethnomusicology; Cognitive Ethnomusicology; Comparative musicology; Evolu-
tion of Music
Patrick E. Savage
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483317731.n759
10.4135/9781483317731.n759
Further Readings
Brown, D. E. (1991). Human universals. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Ellis, A. J. (1885). On the musical scales of various nations. Journal of the Society of Arts, 33(1), 485–527.
Honing, H. (Ed.). (2018). The origins of musicality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McLeod, N. (Ed.). (1971). Musical universals [Special issue]. Ethnomusicology, 15(3), 379–402.
Nettl, B. (2015). The study of ethnomusicology: Thirty-three discussions (3rd ed. ). Urbana: University of Illi-
nois Press.
Savage, P. E., Brown, S., Emi, S., & Currie, T. E. (2015). Statistical universals reveal the structures and func-
tions of human music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,
112(29), 8987–8992.
Vandor, I. (Ed.). (1977). Universals [Special issue]. The World of Music, 19(1–2), 1–129.
Wallin, N. L., Merker, B., & Brown, S. (Eds.). (2000). The origins of music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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