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Like Rap? Hate Country? One Study Blames Evolution

by Amar Toor on December 16, 2009 at 08:45 AM

As Mia Wallace sagely told us, everyone's either an Elvis person or a Beatles person. According to one neurologist, though, all of mankind shares some lowest-common denominator of musical taste, and we have evolution to thank for it.

Dale Purves, Ph.D., a professor of neurobiology at Duke, has just written a journal article with Kamraan Gill, Ph.D., in which they explore the evolutionary underpinnings for why we like the music we like. Though Asian and Western forms of music may seem stylistically disparate, they in fact use the same scale -- and a limited one, at that. But why do we limit our music to such a relatively small sound spectrum? The answer, according to Purves, is because over time, we've developed an appreciation for tones created by human voices, since they're the sounds that were most important to early man when selecting a mate or scoping out competition.

Past research hasn't been able to uncover a connection between the rhythmic and tonal shifts in music and the human voice. Purves and Gill, though, took a different route, comparing musical scales with vocal frequencies, and found that they could predict the most popular scales by how similar they were to frequencies of human language. The scales used in rock music, for example, are particularly similar to our voices. We'd still like to read more scientific explanations for differences in cultural aesthetic, because if the scales are really the same, why do different parts of the world arrange them differently? For now, we'll just stick to Elvis or The Beatles. [From: BoingBoing]

Tags: evolution, music, study, taste, top

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