STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Travel to China, and you might hear American music in the mall. Listen to Paul Simon, and you might hear sounds of South Africa or Brazil. Music from different cultures can feel universal. NPR's Rebecca Hersher reports on researchers who asked if it really is.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRUMMING)
REBECCA HERSHER, BYLINE: This research begins, fittingly enough, with two scientists, Sam Mehr and Manvir Singh, getting their freak on in the middle of the night.
SAM MEHR: (Laughter) You know, when we were, like, in the depths of building this project from scratch, like, Manvir and I would be in my office at, like, you know, 1 in the morning, like, dancing around to, like, crazy songs.
HERSHER: Mehr is a cognitive scientist at Harvard. And back in 2014, he and Singh were grad students. Both were interested in music, but they had a problem. To study music from around the world, you need a database of world music. There are plenty of music databases these days, but they're skewed towards stuff we know.
(SOUNDBITE OF STEVIE WONDER SONG, "SUPERSTITION")
HERSHER: So on nights and weekends, Singh and Mehr systematically built a new database called the Natural History of Song.
MANVIR SINGH: We split the world into 30 subregions. And then from every word region, we collected a dance song, on a healing song, a love song and a lullaby.
HERSHER: The database has 128 songs that you're not going to find on Spotify, songs from small societies like the Igloolik Inuit and Nanai.
MEHR: It's like a treasure hunt.
HERSHER: Armed with their database, they set out to test a theory that music is universally understandable. Doesn't matter who you are, this theory says, if you hear a dance song, you'll know it.
Mehr and Singh did a very simple experiment. They had people from 60 countries take a listening survey online. For example, they might hear 14 seconds of this Micronesian song.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG)
UNIDENTIFIED SINGERS: (Singing in foreign language).
HERSHER: And then answer questions like...
SINGH: To what extent do you think this song is used for dancing?
HERSHER: Or for comforting an infant - or expressing love - or healing someone. When they analyzed all the answers, they found people couldn't pick out a love song or a healing song very well. But...
SINGH: People were really good at lullabies and dance songs. That means that people all around the world have a similar conception of what a dance song should sound like or what a lullaby should sound like.
HERSHER: Like, maybe lullabies everywhere have simpler structures and slower tempos.
(SOUNBITE OF SAMI LULLABY)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Singing in foreign language).
HERSHER: Mehr says he expects their finding will shake up music research.
MEHR: To some people in the field, this is somewhat controversial. It suggests that there are some universal features to these songs.
HERSHER: But he says that shouldn't be upsetting to people who love the diversity of world music.
MEHR: Even though these commonalities are there, there's still this insane amount of variety across cultures. And to us, that's what made a lot of this music really, really fascinating to listen to was like - oh, yeah, this is definitely a dance song. But like, God, it sounds amazing. Like, what are they doing?
SINGH: It kind of reinforces our finding. Like, Sam and I are sitting there listening to, like, an Australian dance song that was recorded in 1940. And we are, like, bugging out and loving it.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOLNGU DANCE SONG)
UNIDENTIFIED SINGERS: (Singing in foreign language).
HERSHER: Rebecca Hersher, NPR News.