Music to your ears

Songs can cut across cultural and language divides, a NZ study has found.

- VERONIKA MEDUNA

Sam Mehr's daughter was less than a day old when she starred in a video to demonstrate the calming effect of a lullaby, all in support of her dad's research into the universal language of music.

Since then, more than 5000 people from 49 countries have listened to snippets of lullabies and three other song types as part of a study to see if they could intuit the context in which these tunes would have been sung. Participants included native speakers of languages from Arabic to Zulu and most were able to correctly classify each song as either a dance, lullaby, healing or love song, suggesting that musical diversity is indeed built on a foundation of acoustic properties that are accessible across cultures.

Mehr, a cognitive scientist at the University of Auckland, says the study recruited people from industrialised and smaller societies and its multicultural nature was important.

"We went to absurd lengths. We translated the study into 29 languages and we gave [colleagues] ruggedised laptops to get into canoes and go to remote villages where people are not connected to the internet or radio and fairly isolated from the music of other cultures."