Music, like language, is made up of combinations of discrete elements. Musical notes are grouped into “phrases” and described in terms of intervals separated in time. In Western music, such intervals are involuntary and are often defined by whole ratios of frequencies or durations. Most studies of music perception have been conducted with participants from Western Europe or North America. Therefore, how music is perceived by other cultures remains a less studied area.
Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Germany), universities of Oslo (Norway), Western Ontario, McMaster (Canada), Brandeis (USA), Vienna University (Austria), Chinese University of Hong Kong (China), Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) and other scientific organisations decided to study this issue more thoroughly. They conducted a study in 39 groups of participants from 15 countries (from North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia).
It should be said that this study grew out of another, smaller study conducted in 2017 by partly the same scientists. Back then, they compared the perception of rhythm in listeners from the US and traditional communities living in the Amazon forest in Bolivia. To measure how participants perceived musical rhythm, the scientists designed a task in which they played a randomly generated series of four bars and then asked listeners to play back what they heard.
