Sam Mehr and Manvir Singh from Harvard’s Music Lab talk with us about their research suggesting that people across the world can detect the social purpose of other cultures’ songs based only on how they sound. Their open-access article, “Form and function in human song” was published in Current Biology on February 5th 2018. The article was co-authored with Hunter York, Luke Glowacki, and Max M. Krasnow.

Universals in Song - Sam Mehr & Manvir Singh Universals in Song - Sam Mehr & Manvir Singh Universals in Song - Sam Mehr & Manvir Singh Universals in Song - Sam Mehr & Manvir Singh Universals in Song - Sam Mehr & Manvir Singh Universals in Song - Sam Mehr & Manvir Singh {{svg_share_icon}} {{svg_share_icon}}



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Bonafide theories are falsifiable theories

Copyright considerations in studies such as theirs

Earlier attempts in literature to identify universals

Checking for headphone use

On form and function of healing songs

Music acquisition in other species

Potential use of data science in Natural History of Music projects

The Center for Open Science’s Preregistration Challenge

Purpose of prestudy

Timing of prestudy

The principal components

On Sam’s research into vocalizing to babies

Why vocal-only music was studied



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Hosts / Producers

Ryan Watkins & Doug Leigh

How to Cite

Watkins, R., Leigh, D., Mehr, S., & Singh, M.. (2018, February 20). Parsing Science – Universals in Songs. figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5915416.v2

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