A team of researchers from McGill University, Technische Universität Berlin, and the University of Montreal played the same music to 40 Mbenzélé Pygmies in the Congo and then to 40 urban Canadians in Montreal and used both emoticons and physiological tests to measure their response.
“Our major discovery is that listeners from very different groups both responded to how exciting or calming they felt the music to be in similar ways,” says Hauke Egermann, who did part of the research as a postdoctoral fellow at McGill.
The musical selection listened to by the two parties was made up of 30 to 90 second samples of both Western music, including the soundtracks to famous films like Star Wars and Psycho, and ceremonial Pygmy polyphonic singing.
The researchers then used emoticons indicating “bad” and “good” as well as “excited” and “calm” to get both groups of users to identify how the music made them feel, while measuring their heart rate, respiration and perspiration with medical equipment.
Amazingly, the Mbenzélé Pygmies, who live without access to radio, television or electricity, had the same subjective and physiological responses to how excited or calm the Western music made them feel as the Canadian group.
According to the researchers, this shows that certain aspects of music are universal and can cut across cultures to communicate basic human feelings.
“This is probably due to certain low-level aspects of music such as tempo (or beat), pitch (how high or low the music is on the scale) and timbre (tone colour or quality), but this will need further research.” says Egermann.
The universal language of music communicates much more than just information however, it can actually change the mood of listeners and even change their perception of reality, causing listeners to actually see happier faces in public when listening to happy music, according to a 2011 study from the University of Groningen.
A 2014 study at the Max Planck Institute found that pregnant women are especially strongly effected by music. Researchers were able to lower or raise the pregnant women’s blood pressure within seconds simply by playing different kinds of music.
While these findings may change the way the western world sees music and its primal ability to communicate emotions, they will come as no surprise to the Mbenzélé Pygmies, who use ceremonial singing in a wide range of common social scenarios to change group moods.
“If a baby is crying, the Mbenzélé will sing a happy song. If the men are scared of going hunting, they will sing a happy song – in general music is used in this culture to evacuate all negative emotions” says Nathalie Fernando of the University of Montreal’s Faculty of Music.
For those of us that live in the urban jungle, this new study shows that we can actually experience much of the same emotions, moods and even physical responses as remote and exotic cultures living thousands of miles away simply by tuning into the same music.
“People have been trying to figure out for quite a while whether the way that we react to music is based on the culture that we come from or on some universal features of the music itself,” says Stephen McAdams, from McGill’s Schulich School of Music. “Now we know that it is actually a bit of both.”
