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Unleash your inner da Vinci with these art and science drawing lessons
Learn how to draw realistic figures for comic books, anatomy courses, and more.
14 June, 2020
- Masterpieces like the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper followed countless hours of anatomical studies.
- Leonardo da Vinci was fascinated by the human form.
- The Complete Creative Art & Science of Drawing Bundle teaches you how to draw human bodies, heads, and more.
<script async="true" src="https://widgets.stackcommerce.com/js-deal-feed/0.1/widget.js" type="text/javascript"></script><p>Fans of the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper are captivated by Leonardo da Vinci's exceptional eye for human forms. Those masterpieces followed countless hours of anatomical studies. Da Vinci was fascinated by the human form, most famously expressed in his classic sketch The Vitruvian Man. </p><p>There are many ways of capturing human figures through drawing, from precise anatomical sketches to essences of characteristics. <strong><a href="https://shop.bigthink.com/sales/the-complete-creative-art-science-of-drawing-bundle?utm_source=bigthink.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=the-complete-creative-art-science-of-drawing-bundle&utm_term=scsf-395850&utm_content=a0x1P000004sOitQAE&scsonar=1" target="_blank">The Complete Creative Art & Science of Drawing Bundle</a></strong> will teach you how to draw a wide range of human bodies, heads, movement, perspective, and much more. </p><p>In this 12-course bundle, you'll learn how to draw 3D objects that appear to occupy space. A human figure drawing course instructs you on the basics of anatomical perspective. From there, you can home in on heads, one of the most challenging aspects of the human body to draw. </p><p>Perhaps you're not that interested in photorealism. That's fine; there's a course on dynamic superheroes that will prepare you to create the comic book that's been in your head. Or, you can forget bodies altogether. Maybe you're more interested in textures and patterns. This bundle has you covered in that aspect as well. 3D objectives and environments? Check. </p><p>No drawing bundle would be complete without a course on animals. In 31 lessons, you'll be given the tools to create the best cat memes around. Two courses on shading will also help you master depth. And if you're intrigued by digital drawing, a master class in creating fantasy art in Manga Studio 5 is included as well. In other words, you'll be well on your way to calling yourself an artist.</p><p><strong><a href="https://shop.bigthink.com/sales/the-complete-creative-art-science-of-drawing-bundle?utm_source=bigthink.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=the-complete-creative-art-science-of-drawing-bundle&utm_term=scsf-395850&utm_content=a0x1P000004sOitQAE&scsonar=1" rel="noopener" target="_blank">The Complete Creative Art & Science of Drawing Bundle</a></strong> is on sale now for $39.99, a 96% discount from the regular cost of $1,172.</p><p><em>Price subject to change.</em></p><h3><strong>More from the Big Think Shop</strong></h3><ul class="ee-ul">
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Musicians and their audiences show synchronized patterns of brain activity
Researchers observed "inter-brain coherence" (IBC) — a synchronisation in brain activity — between a musician and the audience.
31 March, 2020
Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash
When a musician is playing a piece, and the audience is enjoying it, they can develop physical synchronies. Both might tap their feet, sway their bodies, or clap their hands.
<p> "Through music, the producer and the perceiver connect emotionally and behaviourally," note the authors of a <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811920301427?dgcid=rss_sd_all" target="_blank">new paper</a>, published in <em>NeuroImage</em>. And now this team, led by Yingying Hou at East China Normal University, has uncovered a connection right down at the neural level. The team has observed "inter-brain coherence" (IBC) — a synchronisation in brain activity — between a musician and the audience. What's more, the strength of this coherence could be used to predict how much the audience enjoyed a piece.</p><p>The team used a technique called near-infrared spectroscopy to monitor the brain activity of a professional violinist while he was videoed playing a series of 12 brief, classical pieces. They then used the same technique (which involves shining beams of light through the skull, to monitor changes in blood flow) on 16 women while they watched the video, and listened to all of these pieces. (Because gender differences in inter-brain synchronisation have previously been observed, only women were recruited as listeners.)</p>
<p>The violinist had been instructed to look directly at the camera and maintain a neutral expression while he played the pieces, which each lasted about 100 seconds. If he was enjoying one piece more than another, the team hoped this would not be obvious to the viewers. They were told to gaze at the violinist's face while they listened. After each piece, they rated how much they liked it on a seven-point scale.</p><p>The data revealed inter-brain coherence between each of the listeners and the musician, for all of the violin pieces. That is, there were similar patterns of heightened activity in certain key regions of the brain while the violinist played and the other participants listened.</p><p>The key regions included the left temporal cortex (which is thought to focus on processing the rhythm of sound information), the right inferior frontal cortex and the postcentral cortices. These two latter regions have been highlighted as important hubs of a hypothesised mirror system that allows a sender and receiver to share brain representations. "In the present study, the frontoparietal mirror neuron system allows audiences to experience or comprehend the mind of the performer as if they were to 'walk in another's shoes'," the researchers believe.</p>
<p>The team also produced an average IBC score for each piece of music, and compared these with the listeners' averaged liking scores for each piece. They found clear correlations. The more popular pieces were marked by stronger inter-brain coherence in the left temporal cortex between the audience as a whole and the performer.</p><p>The team also reported that the link between level of coherence and popularity only developed during the second half of each piece. This could be because there are two stages to music appreciation, they suggest. The first stage involves recognising rhythms, and identifying the potential musical structure of a piece. During the next stage, the listener develops aesthetic judgements and experiences emotional resonance, and generates stronger predictions about the sounds that 'should' follow. "If the expectation matches the incoming information, the musical performance will be experienced as pleasant," the team thinks.</p><p>More work will be needed to explain why the coherence-liking effect only emerged at a group level, and to explore whether the results obtained here will also apply to other types of musical instrument, and other genres. The team also note that the near-infrared technique only allowed them to look at blood flow in the cortex, not other deeper areas that might be involved in the response to music production and perception, too, such as limbic structures. Also, by design, this study only involved women. Whether men will respond in the same way is unknown.</p><p>Still, it's fascinating research. "This study expands our understanding of music appreciation," the researchers write, adding: "The results can potentially be applied to the development of brain indices for predicting public attitudes towards various musical performances."</p><p>– <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811920301427?dgcid=rss_sd_all" target="_blank">The averaged inter-brain coherence between the audience and a violinist predicts the popularity of violin performance</a></p><p><a href="https://emmayoung.net/" target="_blank">Emma Young</a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/EmmaELYoung" target="_blank">@EmmaELYoung</a>) is a staff writer at <a href="https://digest.bps.org.uk/" target="_blank">BPS Research Digest</a></p><p>Reprinted with permission of <a href="https://digest.bps.org.uk/" target="_blank">The British Psychological Society</a>. Read the <a href="https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/03/23/musicians-and-their-audiences-show-synchronised-patterns-of-brain-activity/" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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Talent, you’re born with. Creativity, you can grow yourself.
In such states of creative divergent thinking, the body is aroused and the pupils become dilated.
27 March, 2020
OSCAR RIVERA/AFP via Getty Images
Creativity, it is said, is intelligence having fun.
<p> It's the ability to generate ideas, solutions or insights that are strikingly original, and yet feasible: in cognitive terms, a compelling creative idea doesn't break down if one were to systematically tease apart its logic. At the same time, it weaves together concepts that were never before part of the same fabric. </p><p>A decade ago, a team of psychologists from the Netherlands <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10463281003765323" target="_blank">proposed</a> the 'dual pathway to creativity model', suggesting that creative ideation occurs when cognitive flexibility is married to cognitive persistence. Cognitive flexibility allows us to make rapid switches in thinking between one concept and another, and to think about multiple concepts simultaneously, while cognitive persistence enables us to stick with a difficult task or conceptualisation in order to achieve a goal. As with a musical harmony where the flautist, violinist, pianist and trombonist must all stick to their individual parts and yet listen to each other and adapt to make fine music, so it is with the creative brain.</p><p>The players in this neural orchestra <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2899886/" target="_blank">consist</a> of three functional brain networks. These form when different regions of the brain (that are not structurally adjacent) are activated together whenever we undertake specific tasks. When it comes to creativity, the major functional networks in <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/central-executive-network" target="_blank">play</a> are the central executive network (CEN), the salience network (SN) and the default mode network (DMN). Brain imaging studies <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18262825" target="_blank">reveal</a> that the CEN is important for flexible, moment-to-moment control. The lateral frontal and parietal brain regions are heavily involved when humans multitask, for instance. Tellingly, a <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19607798" target="_blank">study</a> by neuroscientists at Vanderbilt University in the United States and the University of Queensland in Australia found that efficient multitasking is not represented in the brain as the ability to simultaneously process multiple streams of information, but is instead a very rapid processing of one task after the other. Significantly, they found that we can learn to speed up the processing of each individual task and, hence, multitask better.</p>
<p>The lateral frontal cortex is also heavily <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27893236" target="_blank">activated</a> when individuals engage in divergent thinking, and divergent thinking is how scientists measure creativity; in real life, we can think divergently every day – concocting a recipe from whatever's in the fridge, navigating a car through heavy traffic, making art from nontraditional materials using items from the recycling bin.</p><p>In contrast, the SN, or salience network, whose major hub is the anterior cingulate cortex, is important for sustained task maintenance. This brain region is involved in decision-making and self-regulation, in short, in almost any task that requires cognitive persistence. Finally, the DMN, or default mode network, whose main hubs are in the anterior medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex, represents what we think of when we're not task-focused. As humans, we spend much of our time daydreaming, <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/let-the-soul-dangle-how-mind-wandering-spurs-creativity" target="_blank">mind-wandering</a>, procrastinating, mulling on the past and the future (it is, in fact, very difficult to remain in the present moment) and the DMN is the functional network behind all such self-referential thought. When we engage in tasks requiring us to pay attention to the external world, activity in the DMN is suppressed so that we're not sidelined by distracting, irrelevant thoughts.</p><p>Yet these same distractions and the faraway worlds of our imagination hold the secret to creativity, if only we might harness them and stitch them into the chain of ideas that builds towards a specific goal – a new recipe, a poem, a painting or a musical improvisation. Recent studies <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26553223" target="_blank">indicate</a> that hub regions of the DMN activate simultaneously with those of the CEN and SN, and function in concert during creative ideation. This is a remarkable dance, portraying the dynamic nature of our brain networks. Typically, the CEN and SN exert control over and oppose the DMN yet, during moments of creativity, the DMN allows the spontaneous generation of candidate ideas, possibly from our long-term memory storage, while the CEN/SN come together harmoniously to make use of these ideas towards a specific goal.</p>
<p>Now that we understand the mechanisms in play, it's tempting to ask if we can learn to be more creative. Creativity does <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-016-9832-0" target="_blank">have</a> some genetic heritability: talent – mathematical, musical – runs in families. For example, the Dutch identical twins David Oyens and Pieter Oyens were both successful 19th-century painters. But, given that the human brain is plastic, constantly learning and changing, can we also learn to be creative, based on our experiences?</p><p>In a 2014 <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1871187114000194" target="_blank">study</a> from Stanford University in California, scientists paired with design school faculty to evaluate a very popular class: 'Creative Gym'. In this class, participants work individually on hands-on activities that are unconventional, fast-paced yet immersive, using everyday office supplies as materials. Students are asked to rapidly work through a series of phases: observe, brainstorm, synthesise, prototype and implement, repeating as necessary, to generate innovative solutions. The study showed that students in this creative capacity-building programme tested better on divergent thinking problems against students in a control group. In another <a href="https://behavioralandbrainfunctions.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1744-9081-10-9" target="_blank">study</a>, a collaborative team of neuroscientists and psychologists at Dalian University of Technology in China and the University of Oregon in the US tested participants on divergent thinking tests before and after short-term meditation (30 minutes per day for seven days). The control group practised relaxation for the same duration. The researchers found that creativity can be significantly enhanced by meditation.</p><p>Interestingly, these studies used quite contrasting approaches to test whether creativity is learnable. In the Stanford study, participants exercised cognitive flexibility to generate creative solutions in the classroom. Meanwhile, the meditative training of the Dalian-Oregon study was an exercise in cognitive persistence, the main focus being on building greater awareness of one's sensory experiences. While the researchers in these studies didn't use brain imaging, one can imagine the dynamic dance between the control networks in the brains of the learners, finely collaborating with the spontaneous-thought-generating default network. Overall, these studies suggest that there might be multiple ways to enhance creativity – many pathways to a more creative brain.</p>
<p>Artists, who are creative by profession, often recount the creative process as one in which they become transfigured in mind and body, and by a process over which they don't have much control. They talk about being 'in the zone', or in a state of flow. In such states of creative divergent thinking, the body is aroused and the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10400419.2018.1530533" target="_blank">pupils</a> become dilated. In a recent <a href="http://www.ickn.org/documents/Crea_Happy_COINs18.pdf" target="_blank">study</a>, researchers at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence in the US configured a smartwatch to sense body signals, including heartrate and accelerometer-derived body movement, and got individuals engaged in creative team activities to wear them all day. What they found was that the objectively measured body signals were significant predictors of perceived creativity, as reported by the test subjects. Higher intensity and higher consistency (or lower variability) of body-signal activity predicted greater creativity. The body-signal metrics further complemented self-ratings of personality type and mood.</p><p>Although researchers interested in the physical modalities and neurological pathways of creativity are making headway in understanding how it works – as well as how it can be stimulated – creativity retains a certain mystique as a unique state of being, when mind and body resonate in perfect harmony, like a tuning fork generating a pure tone.</p><p><em>This Idea was made possible through the support of a grant to Aeon from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. Funders to Aeon Magazine are not involved in editorial decision-making.</em><img src="https://metrics.aeon.co/count/612a7c74-b235-4dc3-93ca-8290c4647611.gif" alt="Aeon counter – do not remove"></p><p>This article was originally published at <a href="https://aeon.co/?utm_campaign=republished-article" target="_blank">Aeon</a> and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/talent-youre-born-with-creativity-you-can-grow-yourself" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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Five essential writing tips backed by science
Will Storr has written a masterful guide to writing with "The Science of Storytelling."
24 February, 2020
Photo by Steve Johnson / Unsplash
- In "The Science of Storytelling," journalist Will Storr investigates the science behind great storytelling.
- While good plots are important, Storr writes that great stories revolve around complex characters.
- As in life, readers are drawn to flawed characters, yet many writers become too attached to their protagonists.
<p>We are all hallucinating. No one dropped LSD into the water supply—they didn't have to. "Reality," an ambiguous term coined to denote a common set of shared facts, is a construction we've created in an attempt to comfort us that a master plan exists. It does not. </p><p>In his latest book, "The Science of Storytelling," journalist and novelist Will Storr opens with a simple yet disconcerting message: "Humans might be in unique possession of the knowledge that our existence is essentially meaningless, but we carry on as if in ignorance of it." </p><p>This is why we're all hallucinating. We're not living reality as much as constructing one based on personal history and environment. Over 7 billion human animals walking around, telling ourselves stories about ourselves, using them as emotional shields to guard against the ravages of an indifferent universe. </p><p>That's how powerful stories are. </p><p>Pouring over his notes from years of teaching creative writing, as well as research from his previous works (including "The Unpersuadables" about science deniers, and "Selfie" about our <a href="https://bigthink.com/21st-century-spirituality/how-our-obsession-with-self-esteem-created-the-selfie-generation" target="_self">obsession with ourselves</a>), Storr has written a masterful guide to storytelling. Compact and illuminating, the book combines the last century of neuroscience with 4,000 years of written storytelling to pinpoint what makes stories effective, and what does not. </p><p>Becoming better at writing stories "is simply a matter of peering inwards, at the mind itself, and asking how it does it." At its best, a story mirrors the complexity of the human condition without the fear of danger that occurs in real life. </p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"It's a rollercoaster, but not one made from ramps, rails and steel wheels, but from love, hope, dread, curiosity, status play, constriction, release, unexpected change and moral outrage. Story is a thrill-ride of control." </p><p>There is also, it should be noted, the development of empathy. Storr notes that the invention of the novel may have helped kick off the idea of human rights. Understanding the plight and experiences of others would have been impossible on any meaningful scale before this format was introduced. With the novel, other worlds were exposed. Even in our visual realm of tweet-sized stories, such an ability to communicate across borders still matters. </p><p>While no summation can perfectly capture the totality of this exceptional book, below are five techniques for becoming a better storyteller. As with any good read, Storr takes the advice he's spent years studying and teaching. He's an excellent writer. Reading "The Science of Storytelling" is in itself a pleasure.</p>
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3efe53ec301645adb77ce16caf751c5a"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/P2CVIGuRg4E?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><h2>Change Matters</h2><p>As neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/i-vortex" target="_blank">points out</a>, all life is based on prediction. Even unicellular organisms detect changes in the environment and either embrace them (food; sex) or flee (predators). Humans are no different. We depend on and react to environmental changes all the time: the deer bounding across the street breaking up the monotony of a long drive; the distracted ambivalence of a scorned lover; the anxiety-creating noise of your phone's alerts. We are primed for change. </p><p>Good stories require that a character changes. The best require that the protagonist faces an ultimate challenge, forcing them to confront life-altering change. As mentioned, we are all hallucinating reality all the time, so what happens when the illusion is exposed? Are we willing to explore our trauma and heal the scar tissue, or will we allow that pain to fester until death? Characters must be offered an opportunity for change or else the story never gets off the ground. </p><h2>Cause and Effect</h2><p>When a story is incomplete, <a href="http://jonathangottschall.com/storytelling-animal" target="_blank">writes</a> literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall, our brain automatically fills in the gaps. This is part of the hallucination: we need everything to <em>mean</em> something. Religion is based on this neurological quirk: there <em>must</em> be a reason we're here. So too is our view on medicine and healing: for some, vaccines <em>must</em> cause autism because teasing apart the myriad other causes, from diet and genetics to environmental changes and toxic social structures, is too overwhelming to consider. We demand meaning, yet our brains are lazy, which is why we tend to believe the simplest explanations. </p><p>Storr writes that plots "that play too loose with cause and effect risk becoming confusing, because they're not speaking in the brain's language." Good stories are filled with cause and effect. As a writer, show the cause, don't tell it. If you refuse the reader will grow uninterested. </p><p>While this is a debate I'll likely have with fans until the end of time, season four of "Lost" lost me. There were way too many variables introduced that were dropped in the last two seasons. Too many effects, not enough causes. </p><h2>Expose the Flaws</h2><p>We are all flawed. You, me, Will Storr, every religious figure ever. Storr cites Joseph Campbell throughout his book, yet he doesn't include <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/23332/the-power-of-myth-by-joseph-campbell-with-bill-moyers/" target="_blank">one of my favorites</a>: "It is the imperfections of life that are lovable…it's Christ on the cross that becomes lovable." It's not the Son of God but the infallible man that makes him meaningful to followers. </p><p>Just as we crave meaning, we like to believe we're in control. Flaws often derive from the fact that control is also an illusion. </p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"We're all fictional characters. We're the partial, biased, stubborn creations of our own minds."</p><p>A character's "terrible power" comes from their belief that they're right; in that rightness they feel superior to others. All stories are ultimately about character. Plots are important but without convincing characters, they fall flat. The key to creating memorable characters is by exposing their flaws.</p>
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjc4NTA3Ny9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYwOTk3MzM3Mn0.re_sM10kWGMgTKvjCU8fZSeMVJQwDS85TcfUCWg7sbg/img.jpg?width=980" id="4f66a" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="19c126e88609d18ac4b52dcec4beda83" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Will Storr, author of 'The Heretics', appears at a photocall prior to an event at the 30th Edinburgh International Book Festival, on August 13, 2013 in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Photo by Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images
<h2>The Many Us</h2><p>Many writers fail because they become too emotionally invested in their protagonist, which is often constructed from pieces of the writer. Another way to phrase it: the writer must be willing to expose their own flaws. </p><p>The Buddhist concept of no-self derives from the idea that none of us are ever one single thing. We're influenced by the environment we're in and the people we're around and the amount of caffeine we drink. We have much less willpower at night than in the morning. Our goals and desires shift by the hour. We are many people throughout the day. </p><p>"The difference," Storr writes, "is that in life, unlike in story, the dramatic question of who we are never has a final and truly satisfying answer." Humans are complex animals. We love stories that make us the hero. To be heroic requires recognizing the many conflicting desires and thoughts that make us what we are.</p><h2>The Hero's Journey</h2><p>Which is really what all of this is about: championing the hero. "Stories are tribal propaganda," Storr concludes. The modern storyteller is working with a different landscape than those past. "A unique quality of humans is that we've evolved the ability to <em>think</em> our way into many tribes simultaneously." We're no longer bound by the traditional tribal structure that dominated for hundreds of thousands of years, nor the caste system that commenced with the development of Harappan civilization. Today's hero transcends prior boundaries. </p><p>Though we cannot write off tribalism completely. We're still biologically Stone Age. Just because we have an opportunity to grow does not mean everyone chooses to. "A tribal challenge is existentially disturbing." </p><p>We all believe in stories, and all stories are inventions. If we lose our own hero narrative, depression and anxiety are certain to follow, so invested in our stories have we become. The best storytellers carry their hero through to the end. Their flaws result in transformation. It's what we all crave in a story because it's what we all desire, regardless of how illusive notions of control and closure actually are. </p><p>For the time being, while we're here, we're storytelling animals. Will Storr has contributed a wonderful guide of how to master the craft of invention. To pull a random quote from the formative years of my childhood, as Axl Rose sang, use your illusion. </p><p>--</p><p><em>Stay in touch with Derek on <a href="http://www.twitter.com/derekberes" target="_blank">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/DerekBeresdotcom" target="_blank">Facebook</a>. His next book is "</em><em>Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."</em></p>
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Move over, math. The universal language is world music.
A new study finds that societies use the same acoustic features for the same types of songs, suggesting universal cognitive mechanisms underpinning world music.
02 December, 2019
- Every culture in the world creates music, though stylistic diversity hides their core similarities.
- A new study in Science finds that cultures use identifiable acoustic features in the same types of songs and that tonality exists worldwide.
- Music is one of hundreds of human universals ethnographers have discovered.
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<p>World music's most striking feature is its diversity. A quick survey of modern musical styles demonstrates this variation, as there seems little in commonality between the melodious flow of jazz, the tonal jolts of dubstep, and the earthy twang of country folk.</p><p>If we expand our survey beyond contemporary genres, this diversity becomes even more pronounced. </p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLMlkjnYe0U" target="_blank">Katajjaq</a>, or Inuit throat singing, expresses playfulness in strong, throaty expressions. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu9MT7WiWP4" target="_blank">Japan's <em>nogaku</em></a> punctuates haunting bamboo flutes with the stiff punctuation of percussion. South of Japan, the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIKByvQN0Ho" target="_blank">Australian Aborigines</a> also used winds and percussions, yet their didgeridoos and clapsticks birthed a distinct sound. And the staid echoes of medieval Gregorian chant could hardly be confused for a rousing track of thrash metal.</p><p>Despite music's far reach across cultures and time, its diversity has led many ethnomusicologists to proclaim the idea of a universal "human musicality" to be groundless or even offensive. But <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6468/eaax0868" target="_blank">a new study published in <em>Science</em></a> has found evidence that the world's musics share important acoustic commonalities, despite their apparent differences.</p>
The universal qualities of world music
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjExMzgwNC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyNzA0ODkwMn0.kn6h3Y4O8NH_xymsbrdRuQXNkWC-LAVTFLIYCIG-MtM/img.jpg?width=1245&coordinates=0%2C187%2C0%2C12&height=700" id="da9e0" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="1d52f66e4fc3ab559196e2fa621b5bfe" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />The researchers focused on vocal songs because it is the most ubiquitous instrument available to world music.
<p><a href="https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/samuel-mehr" target="_blank">Samuel Mehr</a>, who studies the psychology of music at Harvard, led a team of researchers in studying musical patterns across cultures. In their "natural history of song," the team collected an ethnography and discography of songs from human cultures across the world.</p><p>The data set only looked at vocal performances because vocal cords are a ubiquitous musical instrument. They focused on four distinct song types: lullabies, dance songs, healing songs, and love songs. These songs were analyzed through transcriptions, machine summaries, and amateur and expert listeners in an online experiment. </p><p><a href="https://medienportal.univie.ac.at/presse/aktuelle-pressemeldungen/detailansicht/artikel/united-in-musical-diversity/" target="_blank">The researchers' analysis of the data</a> revealed that these four music types shared consistent features and that cultures used in similar contexts. Some of the similarities were what you'd expect. Dance songs were faster and had an upbeat tempo when compared to soothing and slow lullabies. </p><p>But the researchers found subtler distinctions also shared across cultures. For example, love songs have a larger size of pitch range and metrical accents than lullabies. Dance songs were more melodically variable than healing songs, while healing songs used fewer notes that were more closely spaced than love songs.</p><p>"Taken together, these new findings indicate that some basic but fundamental principles mapping musical styles onto societal functions and emotional registers exist and can be scientifically analyzed," stated cognitive biologists W. Tecumseh Fitch and Tudor Popescu (University of Vienna), <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6468/944" target="_blank">who wrote the study's perspective piece</a>.</p><p>The study's online experiment asked more than 29,000 participants to listen to songs and categorize them into one of the four types. The researchers precluded offering information that either explicitly or implicitly identified the song's context. They wanted listeners to guess based on the song's acoustic features alone.</p><p>The listeners, amateurs and experts, guessed the correct song type about 42 percent of the time, a success rate that stands well above the 25 percent odds of pure chance. The researchers argue that this shows "that the acoustic properties of a song performance reflect its behavioral context in ways that span human cultures."</p>Far from tone deaf
<p>Of course, we all know that music varies, and the study did find three dimensions that explained the variability across the four song types: formality, arousal, and religiosity. For example, dance songs were found to be high in formality, high in arousal, but low in religiosity. Meanwhile, healing songs were high in all three dimensions, and lullabies were the lowest.</p><p>"Crucially, variability of song context within cultures is much greater than that between cultures, indicating that despite the diversity of music, humans use similar music in similar ways around the world," write Fitch and Popescu.</p><p>In addition, all of the studied songs showed tonality—that is, they built melodies by composing from a fixed set of tones. </p><p>To test this, the researchers asked 30 musical experts to listen to sample of songs and state whether they heard at least one tonal center. Of the 118 songs listened to, 113 were rated as tonal by 90 percent of the experts. These results suggest the widespread, perhaps universal, nature of tonality.</p><p>With all that said, the writers still recognize avenues of future research. They point out that the current database doesn't explain the variance in societal contexts and acoustic variables. The vocal-only nature of the data also leaves an immense library of instrumental and rhythmic music unexplored. And as with any research into human universals, the database cannot hope to be comprehensive enough to support evidence from every human culture. Additional cultures and musical styles remain to be investigated.</p><p>However, Fitch and Popescu note, Mehr and his colleagues have provided a deeper understanding of a potential universal cognitive mechanism for music and a blueprint for future empirical tests. </p><p>"Today, with smartphones and the internet, we can easily imagine a comprehensive future database, including recordings of all cultures and styles, richly annotated with video and text, being assembled in a citizen science initiative," they write.</p>The universals that bind us
<div class="rm-shortcode" data-media_id="KBOneGNW" data-player_id="FvQKszTI" data-rm-shortcode-id="70be6188c96629290e363e875942d4c9"> <div id="botr_KBOneGNW_FvQKszTI_div" class="jwplayer-media" data-jwplayer-video-src="https://content.jwplatform.com/players/KBOneGNW-FvQKszTI.js"> <img src="https://cdn.jwplayer.com/thumbs/KBOneGNW-1920.jpg" class="jwplayer-media-preview" /> </div> <script src="https://content.jwplatform.com/players/KBOneGNW-FvQKszTI.js"></script> </div> <p>Music is hardly the only human universal. Scientists have identified hundreds of cultural, societal, behavioral, and mental universals that have been identified among all known peoples, contemporary and historic. These include language, tool usage, death rituals, and, of course, music.</p><p><a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170620093153.htm" target="_blank">Study of fossils</a> has discovered that <em>Homo heidelbergensis</em>, a common ancestor of <em>Homo sapiens</em> and Neanderthals, had the ability to control pitch (or "sing") at least a million years ago. But having the ability in tandem with the cognitive capabilities to control it is another matter. Humans are the only <em>Homo genus </em>we know has met all the musical requirements, and we can't be certain when these coalesced in our evolutionary history.</p><p>Additionally, archaeologists have found bone pipes made from swan and vulture bones dating back between 39,000 and 43,000 years ago. However, these were likely the result of a long creative process, likely preceded by instruments crafted by grasses, reeds, and wood, materials that are not as well preserved in the fossil record.</p><p>This makes it difficult to pinpoint when music entered our evolutionary history and therefore to pinpoint its evolutionary advantage. <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2017.00008/full" target="_blank">According to Jeremy Montagu</a>, former musicologist at Oxford, one proposal is social bonding:</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">[M]usic is not only cohesive on society but almost adhesive. Music leads to bonding, bonding between mother and child, bonding between groups who are working together or who are together for any other purpose. Work songs are a cohesive element in most pre-industrial societies, for they mean that everyone of the group moves together and thus increases the force of their work. […] Dancing or singing together before a hunt or warfare binds the participants into a cohesive group, and we all know how walking or marching in step helps to keep one going.</p><p><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027944?seq=1" target="_blank">According to anthropologist Donald Brown</a>, despite human universals' widespread nature, they result from relatively few processes or conditions. These include diffusion of ancient cultural traits or cultures meeting the demands of our physical reality. They can also stem from the operation and structure of the human mind, and therefore can result from said mind's evolution.</p><p>Which is it for music? We don't yet know.</p><p>The Science study authors suggest a picture emerging that music is an evolutionary adaptation—though, whether music is its own specific adaptation or a byproduct of other adaptations remains even more unclear. However, Montagu suggests a more cultural origin when he writes: "Each culture develops the tuning system that best suits its ideas of musicality. It is up to the cognitive scientists to determine why this should be so, but they have to admit, if they are willing to listen to the exotic musics of the world, that these differences exist."</p><p>Further complicating the matter is the fact that while every human can appreciate music, not everyone can create it or even desires to (unlike language or other innate universals).</p>
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