The Universality of Music

Question 1

Can all humans recognise music?

Answer 1

Yes. Can understand music even if different language-speaking people play the piano etc.

Question 2

Can all humans recognise language?

Answer 2

No - cannot understand them when they talk.

Question 3

What is an argument FOR music being universal?

Answer 3

Remote African people could identify emotion in Western (mostly classical) music.

They were able to map onto a Western audiences emotional understanding of the music.

Music was tapping into a universal emotional understanding.

Question 4

Who conducted the study on music universality with classical pieces and African people?

Answer 4

Fritz et al. (2019)

Question 5

What 2 things did Fritz et al. (2019) find about classical music and Africans?

Answer 5

African people were able to identify emotions in Western (mostly classical) music.

Both Western and African participants preferred tonal (consonant) music to atonal music.

Question 6

What is tonal music?

Answer 6

Has a particular key structure and tonal pattern

Question 7

What is a limitation of Fritz et al. (2019) study?

Answer 7

Materials and contexts that were used were not equivalent.

Should have used a wider range of materials for both sets of participants.

Playing someone a clip of music and asking them to respond to it is not really the right context for listening to music.

Question 8

What is another argument for why we might find more agreement across different cultures for Western music, put forward by Storr?

Answer 8

Western music has colonised the world through media (e.g., movies, record industry, mass media)

Globalisation of culture in terms of Western music is more identifiable than it would have been 100 years ago - it is hard to find societies that haven’t in some way engaged with some sort of Western culture through the media

Question 9

What is the piano organised around?

Answer 9

12 equal semitones

Question 10

What ways can we structure music across cultures?

Answer 10

Different intervals and semitones (Indian music deals with smaller intervals and semitones)

Western structure = diatonic scale. 12 equal semitones.

Pentatonic

Whole tone (no semitones)

Slendro and pelog are scales associated with the gamelan orchestra in Indonesia