Cross-cultural Insights into Music Perception

Most of what we know about perception derives from experiments conducted on members of developed Western societies. Yet many additional insights can be gained by studying other cultures. Phenomena that are consistent across cultures likely reflect biological constraints on perception, whereas those that vary cross-culturally could represent effects of culture-specific experience. I will describe our experiments assessing aspects of music-related audition in remote populations in rural Bolivia. We observe significant cross-cultural variation in aspects of perception that have often been presumed by scientists to be universal, such as the preference for canonically consonant pitch combinations, or the perceptual equivalence of tones separated by octaves. However, we also find strong consistencies in other music perceptual phenomena, such as the assumption of a logarithmic scale for pitch intervals, despite highly divergent musical experience among the studied cultures. The results provide new insights into universal features of perception and the role of culture in shaping how we hear and evaluate music.