Survey of academics

Participants first indicated their primary and secondary fields of study, career stage, expertise in music performance, and degree of familiarity with music from small-scale societies. They then answered the two key questions described below, followed by a number of other questions about universals in music and other behaviors, human evolution, and the scientific study of music which are not relevant to the present report. The two items that participants completed are reproduced in full below:

(a) Here is a thought experiment. Imagine that you are a researcher with unlimited time and resources, and have access to a fantastic time machine that can put you anywhere in the world at any time.

Imagine that you use your time machine and your unlimited time and resources to obtain a recording of every single song that has ever been sung by every person in the world (everyone from people in big cities to people in isolated hunter-gatherer groups). For each song, you also find out what the people do while listening to or while singing the song; e.g., that people dance along to it, use the song to calm down a fussy infant, etc.

Then, you run a simple experiment. You take these many recordings and play each one for many people around the world (from people in big cities to people in isolated hunter-gatherer groups).

After they listen to the recording, you ask each of these people to think about the singer, and to say what behaviors they think the singer was using the song with (e.g., “used to soothe a baby,” “used for dancing,” “used for healing illness,” “used for expressing love to another person”). They have only heard the recording and don’t know the answer: they will be guessing the behaviors on the basis of how the song sounds and nothing else.

There are a range of possible outcomes. It might be that people can can guess what a song is used for just by hearing it, without any prior experience or knowledge about the song’s cultural context. On the other hand, it might be that music around the world and over time is so variable that listeners would have trouble guessing what a song is used for just by hearing it.

What do you think the results of this imaginary experiment would be?

Response options were: On average, people would be very bad at accurately guessing the behaviors; On average, people would be kind of bad at accurately guessing the behaviors; On average, people would be kind of good at accurately guessing the behaviors; On average, people would be very good at accurately guessing the behaviors; and I prefer not to answer.

(b) Whether or not people are good at guessing what a song is used for, people from different cultural backgrounds might interpret music in similar ways, or in different ways. In the same imaginary experiment, imagine that you measured how consistent the people’s answers were with one another. What do you think the result would be?

Response options were: The guesses from people all over the world would be very inconsistent with one another; The guesses from people all over the world would be kind of inconsistent with one another; The guesses from people all over the world would be kind of consistent with one another; The guesses from people all over the world would be very consistent with one another; and I prefer not to answer.

For both questions, we did not analyze data from subjects who responded I prefer not to answer. Responses on both questions were coded as binary variables, that is, grouping together the lower two and upper two responses to both questions.