PUBLISHED: 10 JANUARY 2017 | VOLUME: 1 | ARTICLE NUMBER: 0018

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CULTURAL EVOLUTION

Lab-cultured musical universals

Universal features of rhythmic music emerge culturally via iterated learning in the laboratory.

W. Tecumseh Fitch

T
he issue of universals in human culture
whether in languages, music,
religions or other domains has
always generated controversy and debate.
This is partly because cultures vary greatly,
at least superficially: there always seems
to be some group somewhere that violates

SHIVA RAMESH KUMARAPPAN / EYEEM / GETTY

any proposed universal laws. Nonetheless,
attempts to understand human nature and
the biological basis of human culture keep
returning to this issue. For language, a long
tradition in comparative linguistics defines
and studies language universals of various
sorts. In contrast, in music this topic has lain
dormant until quite recently. But a recent
series of papers has broken this silence,
and the issue of musical universals is now
in the air.
Writing in Nature Human Behaviour,
Andrea Ravignani and colleagues offer
a fascinating new take on this perennial
question by attempting to grow music
universals in the lab1. Working in the
lab of Simon Kirby at the University
of Edinburgh, they observed how
rhythmic universals emerge over time.
The experiments use a method called
iterated learning, frequently used to study
linguistic phenomena. In this method, a
first generation of participants is offered
some unstructured and incomplete set of
data (say, random letter strings matched
randomly to meanings). Needless to say,
such random lists are difficult to memorize,
and when participants are tested later, they
make mistakes. The crucial idea in iterated
learning is that these partly erroneous
outputs of this first generation provide the
input to a second independent generation
of participants, to form a transmission
chain. This process is then repeated over
multiple further generations, resembling
the party game called Chinese whispers
(UK) or Telephone (US). Surprisingly,
under a wide range of conditions, the
outputs of later generations are highly
structured, easy to learn, and resemble
phenomena seen in real languages.
The study by Ravignani etal. used this
same approach but with a novel type of
stimuli: drumming.
The experimenters gave participants
a drumstick and an electronic drum pad
that recorded each strike to a computer.
Participants listened to 32 drum patterns
and tried to reproduce them; the initial
inputs were totally random computer-
generated patterns. Subsequent generations
heard the human-generated outputs from
previous generations, and over time the
patterns grew increasingly structured. After
nine generations, each of six transmission
lines had generated rhythmic cultures, each
one different, but all showing a small set of
durations and regular timing rhythmic
universals proposed by previous workers2.
The search for musical universals has a
colourful history. An early and promising
attempt to discover musical universals
centred in pre-war Berlin3, but this field of
comparative musicology was crushed by the
Nazis, and little remained by the 1950s. After
this, the anthropologically oriented discipline
of ethnomusicology scrupulously avoided
comparisons between cultures, and for most
ethnomusicologists discussions of musical
universals were considered taboo4. With
a few brave exceptions like the American
musicologist Alan Lomax 5, this taboo lasted
almost to the present day, but a recent string
of publications has finally lifted the silence2,6,7.
These new studies suggest that while
there may be no absolute universals (found
in every single culture), there are very
strong statistical tendencies. For example,
musics around the world tend to involve a
small set of notes of particular frequency
relationships (a scale) and most music
involves a relatively steady beat (termed
isochronicity). Equally interesting are a class
of implicational universals, where particular
genres of music are highly likely to have
particular characteristics (for example,
both of the tendencies mentioned above
are stronger in ensemble music, played
by groups of performers). These broad
comparative results suggest that the human
capacity for music, the musicality of our
species, has strong biological roots8. The
situation may be similar to linguistics, where
the human capacity to acquire language is
widely agreed to be universal across cultures,
and to have a biological basis in our species,
but few examples of truly universal features,
found in every language, are known9.
Where do these statistical universals,
consistent across the worlds musics,
come from? Few think that such features
as isochronicity are hard-coded into the
human genome, but humans may have a
biologically given propensity to structure
acoustic input in certain ways, leading over
time to a cultural emergence of universals.
This is what Ravignanis results suggest:
participants unconsciously regularized
initially random inputs into increasingly

NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR 1, 0018 (2017) | DOI: 10.1038/s41562-016-0018 | www.nature.com/nathumbehav 1

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structured rhythms, and this progressively
led to the emergence of such features
as isochronicity and metrical structure
(a tendency to interpret individual events
as members of hierarchically structured
groups). The experiments demonstrate this
is a reasonable hypothesis in principle, and
furthermore that this temporal evolution
of a new musical culture can be studied in
the laboratory.
The study raises many new questions. In
particular, two issues remain open. First,
to what extent are the patterns observed
dependent on previous musical exposure?
Although Ravignanis study excluded
musicians, any adult has had a massive
exposure to music, and participants might
mimic familiar features in their output.
Addressing this possibility will require
cross-cultural studies, comparing the
output of peoples exposed to very different
musical styles.
Second, are the processes that lead to the
emergence of musical universals specific
to music or reflections of more general-
purpose constraints on working memory,
time perception and so on? The authors
hypothesize that most of their results
might reflect general-purpose as opposed
to music-specific cognitive constraints,
but I think it remains likely that some of
the observed outcomes may reflect music-
specific abilities. For example, isochronicity
is very typical of music and dance around
the world, but rarely found in language;
nor is a capacity for isochronicity found in
most animal species10. Thus, even if some
regularities that arose in the current study
result from general-purpose constraints on
learning and memory, it remains possible
that other factors are music-specific. This
would seem particularly likely if, as Darwin
speculated, basic musical abilities such as
singing and drumming preceded language
in hominin evolution, and thus have a
long evolutionary history. The paradigm
pioneered by Ravignani and colleagues
offers a promising new approach to address
these age-old questions. 
W.Tecumseh Fitch is in the Department of
Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna,
1090 Vienna, Austria.
e-mail: tecumseh.fitch@univie.ac.at
References
1. Ravignani, A., Delgado, T. & Kirby, S. Nat. Hum. Behav.
1, 0007 (2016).
2. Brown, S. & Jordania, J. Psychol. Music 41, 229248 (2013).
3. von Hornbostel, E.M. Africa 1, 3062 (1928).
4. Nettl, B. in The Origins of Music (eds Wallin, N.L., Merker, B. &
Brown, S.) 463472 (The MIT Press, 2000).
5. Lomax, A. World Music 19, 117129 (1977).
6. Fritz, T.H. etal. Curr. Biol. 19, 573576 (2009).
7. Savage, P.E., Brown, S., Sakai, E. & Currie, T.E. Proc. Natl Acad.
Sci. USA 112, 89878992 (2015).
8. Honing, H., ten Cate, C., Peretz, I. & Trehub, S.E. Phil. Trans.
R.Soc. B 370, 20140088 (2015).
9. Fitch, W.T. Phil. Trans. R.Soc. B 366, 376388 (2011).
10. Fitch, W.T. Phil. Trans. R.Soc. B 370, 20140091 (2015).

2 NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR 1, 0018 (2017) | DOI: 10.1038/s41562-016-0018 | www.nature.com/nathumbehav

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