Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech

Yuto Ozaki, Adam Tierney, Peter Q. Pfordresher, et al. Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech: A Registered Report, Science Advances, 15 May 2024m Vol 10, Issue 20, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adm9797

Abstract: Both music and language are found in all known human societies, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we analyzed two global datasets: (i) 300 annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of traditional songs, recited lyrics, conversational speech, and instrumental melodies from our 75 coauthors speaking 55 languages; and (ii) 418 previously published adult-directed song and speech recordings from 209 individuals speaking 16 languages. Of our six preregistered predictions, five were strongly supported: Relative to speech, songs use (i) higher pitch, (ii) slower temporal rate, and (iii) more stable pitches, while both songs and speech used similar (iv) pitch interval size and (v) timbral brightness. Exploratory analyses suggest that features vary along a “musi-linguistic” continuum when including instrumental melodies and recited lyrics. Our study provides strong empirical evidence of cross-cultural regularities in music and speech.

From the introduction:

Culturally relativistic hypotheses appear to be dominant among ethnomusicologists. For example, in a 13 January 2022 email to the International Council for Traditional Music email list entitled “What is song?,” International Council for Traditional Music Vice-President Don Niles requested definitions for “song” that might distinguish it from “speech” cross-culturally. Much debate ensued, but the closest to such a definition that appeared to emerge, was the following conclusion published by Savage et al. (25) based on a comparative analysis of 304 audio recordings of music from around the world:

“Although we found many statistical universals, absolute musical universals did not exist among the candidates we were able to test. The closest thing to an absolute universal was Lomax and Grauer’s (30) definition of a song as a vocalization using “discrete pitches or regular rhythmic patterns or both,” which applied to almost the entire sample, including instrumental music. However, three musical examples from Papua New Guinea containing combinations of friction blocks, swung slats, ribbon reeds, and moaning voices contained neither discrete pitches nor an isochronous beat. It should be noted that the editors of the Encyclopedia did not adopt a formal definition of music in choosing their selections. We thus assume that they followed the common practice in ethnomusicology of defining music as “humanly organized sound” (31) other than speech, with the distinction between speech and music being left to each culture’s emic (insider and subjective) conceptions, rather than being defined objectively by outsiders. Thus, our analyses suggest that there is no absolutely universal and objective definition of music but that Lomax and Grauer’s definition may offer a useful working definition to distinguish music from speech.”

However, the conclusion of Savage et al. (25) was based only on an analysis of music; thus, the contrast with speech is speculative and not based on comparative data. Some studies have identified differences between speech and song in specific languages, such as song being slower and higher-pitched (32–35). However, a lack of annotated cross-cultural recordings of matched speaking and singing has hampered attempts to establish cross-cultural relationships between speech and song (36). [...]

Our study overcomes these issues by creating a unique dataset of matched singing and speaking of diverse languages, with each recording manually segmented into acoustic units (e.g., syllables, notes, and phrases) by the coauthor who recorded it in their own first/heritage language.