Automatic comparison of human music, speech, and bird song suggests uniqueness of human scales

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Publication type: Articles in peer reviewed conference proceedings

Abstract: The uniqueness of human music relative to speech and animal song has been extensively debated, but rarely directly measured. We applied an automated scale analysis algorithm to a sample of 86 recordings of human music, human speech, and bird songs from around the world. We found that human music throughout the world uniquely emphasized scales with small-integer frequency ratios, particularly a perfect 5th (3:2 ratio), while human speech and bird song showed no clear evidence of consistent scale-like tunings. We speculate that the uniquely human tendency toward scales with small-integer ratios may relate to the evolution of synchronized group performance among humans.

@inproceedings{kuroyanagi2019automatic,
  title={Automatic comparison of human music, speech, and bird song suggests uniqueness of human scales},
  author={Jiei Kuroyanagi, Shoichiro Sato, Meng-Jou Ho, Gakuto Chiba, Joren Six, 
                Peter Pfordresher, Adam Tierney, Shinya Fujii and Patrick Savage},
  year={2019},
  proceedings ={Proceedings of the 9th Folk Music Analysis conference (FMA 2019)}
}