Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries

Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random ‘seed’ rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of ‘telephone’), such that their biases (the prior) could be estimated from the distribution of reproductions. Every tested group showed a sparse prior with peaks at integer-ratio rhythms. However, the importance of different integer ratios varied across groups, often reflecting local musical practices. Our results suggest a common feature of music cognition: discrete rhythm ‘categories’ at small-integer ratios. These discrete representations plausibly stabilize musical systems in the face of cultural transmission but interact with culture-specific traditions to yield the diversity that is evident when mental representations are probed across many cultures.

音乐存在于每个已知的社会中，但因地而异。对于音乐认知来说，如果有什么是普遍的，那会是什么呢？我们测量了15个国家的39个参与群体对节奏的心理表征特征，这些群体涵盖了城市社会和原住民群体。听者重现随机的“种子”节奏；他们的重现被反馈作为刺激（就像“传话”游戏那样），这样就可以从重现的分布中估计出他们的偏差（先验）。每个接受测试的群体都表现出一种稀疏先验，在整数比节奏处有峰值。然而，不同整数比的重要性在各个群体中有所不同，这常常反映当地的音乐实践。我们的研究结果表明了音乐认知的一个共同特征：小整数比的离散节奏“类别”。面对文化传播，这些离散表征似乎稳定了音乐系统，但它们又与特定文化的传统相互作用，从而产生了在对许多文化的心理表征进行探究时明显可见的多样性。