Worldwide Music, Worldwide Emotions
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Native African people who have never even listened to the radio before can nonetheless pick up on happy, sad, and scared emotions in Western music, according to a new report published in the journal Current Biology. Dr. Thomas Fritz of the Max-Planck Institute tells us about visiting an isolated village in Cameroon in which he played samples of rock, jazz and classical music for a local tribe – and why this study "provides the first solid evidence for a universal human ability to distinguish basic emotions in music."
- Article about the study on ScienceNews.org
- Soundcheck Blog: John Schaefer on the Universality of Music
- Study: Universal Recognition of Three Basic Emotions in Music
Comments [4]
Does the precision of Western music make it uniquely able to have a universal understanding? Also, European composers have had to develop music for wider audiences that spoke different languages, practiced different religions and had other cultural differences. Is it possible they were forced to tap into a more general set of emotions than other musical groups that probably were creating music just for one ethnic group?
What about people who are deaf does it effect their emotions? Does music still effect them by feeling and experiencing sound waves?
What about those who go deaf does that effect the way they experience emotions.
Does anyone stop to think that most western music is so lacking in subtlety that almost any organism could identify emotional cues.
It's sort of like watching a Jerry Bruckheimer movie and not getting what he's trying to say, it's impossible to miss.
Nothing exemplifies the universality if western music than the global popularity of rap which is now performed in Arabic, Hindi, Italian, Cantonese, Zulu, Bamanakan, Russian, Farsi and many more languages and people.
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