No matter where they are from, similar-sounding songs are associated with the same social activities, such as infant care, healing, love and dance, the study found. The findings were published Thursday in the journal Science.
The new research suggests a fundamental property underlying music’s uncanny hold on the mind, several evolutionary biologists and musicologists said—at a time when people listen to more music than ever, streaming some 611 billion songs on demand last year, according to Nielsen data.
“That is something that has been strongly debated,” said evolutionary biologist Tecumseh Fitch at the University of Vienna in Austria, who studies human speech, music and language and wasn’t involved in the project.
