Over the past few years, cross-cultural comparative work has made various claims about the universality of aspects of music, aesthetic preferences, and emotion (Fritz 2009, Brown & Jordania 2013, Savage et al. 2015). However, recent work suggests that features that were previously regarded as universal —such as consonance / dissonance, or rhythm perception— may in fact be at least partially determined by culture (McDermott et al. 2016, Jacoby & McDermott 2017, Polak et al. 2018). We have accordingly initiated the Global Survey of Rhythm Representation, a multicultural collaborative project that aims to understand the interaction of the roles of biology and culture in the study of simple rhythms. The survey is based on a novel paradigm we developed that is nearly entirely independent of verbal description, and can therefore be applied irrespective of the participant’s musical or cultural background. The cultures we investigated span a wide range of geographical and demographic conditions as well as linguistic and musical structures. This ongoing project, which involves nearly 30 collaborators, has already collected data from over 700 participants hailing from Botswana, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, India, Japan, Mali, Turkey, Uruguay, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Collaborators

Jacoby, Nori¹, Rainer Polak¹, Jessica A. Grahn², Daniel J. Cameron³, Kyung Myun Lee⁴, Eduardo A. Undurraga⁵, Ricardo Godoy⁶, Tomas Huanca⁷, Timon Thalwitzer⁸, Daniel Goldberg⁹, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis¹⁰, Patrick C.M. Wong¹¹, Martín Rocamora¹², Luis Jure¹², Shinya Fujii¹³, Patrick E. Savage¹³, Jun Ajimi¹⁴, Rei Konno¹³, Sho Oishi¹³, Kelly Jakubowski¹⁵, Martin Clayton¹⁵, Andre Holzapfel¹⁶, Esra Mungan¹⁷, Ece Kaya¹⁷, Bronwyn Tarr¹⁸, and Josh H. McDermott¹⁹

¹Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, ²University University of Western Ontario, ³McMaster University, ⁴Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, ⁵Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, ⁶Brandeis University, ⁷Centro Boliviano de Investigacion y Desarrollo Socio Integral, ⁸University of Vienna, ⁹University of Connecticut, ¹⁰Princeton University, ¹¹Chinese University of Hong Kong, ¹²Universidad de la República, ¹³Keio University, ¹⁴Tokyo University of the Arts, ¹⁵Durham University, ¹⁶KTH Royal Institute of Technology, ¹⁷Bogazici University, ¹⁸University of Oxford, ¹⁹Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Featured publications

Jacoby, Nori, and Josh McDermott. "Integer ratio priors on musical rhythm revealed cross-culturally by iterated reproduction." Current Biology 27.3 (2017): 359–370. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.12.031.