WHAT IS THAT MELODY?!
Psych 🧠 - 478/500
Hey reader 👋
What counts as music feels obvious until it suddenly isn’t. Is chanting music? Is crying musical? What about rhythmic work sounds?
This paper zooms in on that fuzzy line we all assume exists, and asks a deceptively simple question: do humans actually agree on what music is?
What is it?
This research studies the conceptual boundary between “music” and “non-music” using a cross-cultural behavioral experiment.
Participants from Brazil, China, and the United States listened to short, two-second audio clips drawn from 11 sound categories including traditional music from 130 societies worldwide, speech, environmental sounds, animal noises, and human vocalizations like crying. For each sound, they answered two questions:
Is this music? (yes/no)
How musical is it? (1–7 scale)
Key Findings:
The key finding is subtle but powerful: people strongly agree on what counts as prototypical music, but beyond that, agreement collapses.
Judgments about borderline sounds vary wildly across individuals even within the same country. This suggests that music is not a clean category, but a graded, context-dependent concept rather than a sharply defined one.
Across all sounds, participants labeled “music” about 51% of the time (near chance).
Traditional vocal and non-vocal music were overwhelmingly classified as music (~87%).
Speech, nature sounds, and environmental noises were almost never labeled music (≈2–4%).
Borderline categories (e.g., crying, human non-vocal sounds) showed high disagreement.
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What do I need to know:
Humans share strong intuitions about clear examples of music but not about edge cases.
The concept of music appears fuzzy, not categorical.
Agreement breaks down exactly where theory struggles: ambiguous sounds.
Cultural background mattered less than expected; individual interpretation mattered more.
Source:
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/huzpx_v4