Authors Yuto Ozaki, Adam Tierney, Peter Pfordresher, John Mcbride, Emmanouil Benetos, Polina Proutskova, Gakuto Chiba, Fang Liu, Nori Jacoby, Suzanne Purdy, Patricia Opondo, Tecumseh Fitch, Shantala Hegde, Martín Rocamora, Rob Thorne, Florence Ewomazino Nweke, Dhwani Sadaphal, Parimal Sadaphal, Shafagh Hadavi, Shinya Fujii, Sangbuem Choo, Marin Naruse, Utae Ehara, Latyr Sy, Mark Lenini Parselelo, Manuel Anglada-Tort, Niels Chr. Hansen, Felix Haiduk, Ulvhild Færøvik, Violeta Magalhães, Wojciech Krzyżanowski, Olena Shcherbakova, Diana Hereld, Brenda Suyanne Barbosa, Marco Antonio Correa Varella, Mark van Tongeren, Polina Dessiatnitchenko, Su Zar Zar, Iyadh El Kahla, Olcay Muslu, Jakelin Troy, Teona Lomsadze, Dilyana Kurdova, CristianoTsope, Daniel Fredriksson, Aleksandar Arabadjiev, Jehoshaphat Philip Sarbah, Adwoa Arhine, Tadhg Ó Meachair, Javier Silva-Zurita, Ignacio Soto-Silva, Neddiel Elcie Muñoz Millalonco, Rytis Ambrazevičius, Psyche Loui, Andrea Ravignani, Yannick Jadoul, Pauline Larrouy-Maestri, Camila Bruder, Tutushamum Puri Teyxokawa, Urise Kuikuro, Rogerdison Natsitsabui, Nerea Bello Sagarzazu, Limor Raviv, Minyu Zeng, Shahaboddin Dabaghi Varnosfaderani, Juan Sebastián Gómez-Cañón, Kayla Kolff, Christina der Nederlanden, Meyha Chhatwal, Ryan Mark David, I Putu Gede Setiawan, Great Lekakul, Vanessa Nina Borsan, Nozuko Nguqu, Patrick E. SavagePlease use the format "First name initials family name" as in "Marie S. Curie, Niels H. D. Bohr, Albert Einstein, John R. R. Tolkien, Donna T. Strickland"
Abstract <p>What, if any, similarities and differences between music and speech are consistent across cultures? Both music and language are found in all known human societies and are argued to share evolutionary roots and cognitive resources, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music across languages on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we analyze a novel dataset of 300 high-quality annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of singing, recitation, conversational speech, and instrumental music from our 75 coauthors whose 55 1st/heritage languages span 21 language families to find strong evidence for cross-culturally consistent differences and similarities between music and language. Of our six pre-registered predictions, five were strongly supported: relative to speech, songs use 1) higher pitch, 2) slower temporal rate, and 3) more stable pitches, while both songs and speech used similar 4) pitch interval size, and 5) timbral brightness. Our 6th prediction that song and speech would show similar pitch declination was inconclusive, with exploratory analysis suggesting that songs tend to follow an arched contour while speech contours tend to decline overall but end with a slight rise. Because our non-representative language sample and unusual design involving coauthors as participants could affect our results, we also performed robustness analyses - including a parallel reanalysis of a previously published dataset of 418 song/speech recordings from 209 individuals whose 16 languages span 11 language families (Hilton & Moser et al., 2022, Nature Human Behaviour) - which confirmed that our conclusions are robust to these potential biases. Exploratory analyses identified additional features such as phrase length, intensity, and rhythmic/melodic regularity that also consistently distinguish song from speech, and suggest that such features also vary along a “musi-linguistic” continuum in a cross-culturally consistent manner when including instrumental melodies and recited lyrics. Further exploratory analysis suggests that pitch height is the only consistently sexually dimorphic feature (female singing/speaking is almost one octave higher than male on average), and that other factors such as musical training and recording context may also interact to influence the magnitude of song-speech differences. Our study provides strong empirical evidence for the existence of cross-cultural regularities in music and speech.</p>
