From Andean pan - pipe ballads to hijack sea hut , all form of music share certain unwashed elements , despite being derived from hugely contrasting ethnic circumstance . This has given rise to legion theories about the possibility ofmusicbeing hardwired into homo ’ brains , and a newfangled study in the journalNature Human Behaviouradds yet more system of weights to this hypothesis .
Intriguingly , the field of study generator also suggest that it may actually be the shortcomings and imperfections of our cognition that cause us to form sound into memorable rhythms and melodies .
The research worker behind the paper recently conduct a separate study in which they analyzed 304 musical recordings from around the world , and identified 18 features that appear to beshared among all musical tradition . Of these , six were touch torhythm : a metronomic beat , clusters of two to three beat , a preference for two - beat component part , veritable flabby and stiff beats , a small number of beat patterns per song , and the foundation of riffs or tunes using these patterns .
Using this as a starting stage , the squad enrol 48 non - player from the University of Edinburgh to play a game of percussive Chinese whispers in group of eight . The first person in each group had to copy a series of 12 random meter , generated by a computer , that did not obey any of the six oecumenical corpus of musical regular recurrence . Each sequential participant then had to endeavor to emulate what the former somebody had played .
By the time the final role player had performed their interpretation , the to begin with unmelodious succession of beats had transformed into structured , easy to think back patterns that adhered to all six rhythmical universals .
In their write - up , the bailiwick author purpose that this occurred because think of 12 altogether random beat is beyond the capability of the human brain , which tends instead to return memorable patterns consisting of regularly repeating components .
Rhythms therefore emerge as sequential players “ introduce errors in their efforts to replicate the sequences they heard , ” removing the more anomalous round and replacing them with ones that were easier to reproduce .
As such , the researcher speculate that it is the special nature of ourworking memory – which can typically throw between five and seven pieces of information at a sentence – that causes us to produce music with a small figure of recurring beats , rather than many idiosyncratic elements .
In other language , the musical structures and patterns that seem in all cultures may be a mathematical product of our brain plainly not being good enough to remember long , disorganized sequence of notes .
