Dataset Information

Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries.

ABSTRACT: Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random 'seed' rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of 'telephone'), such that their biases (the prior) could be estimated from the distribution of reproductions. Every tested group showed a sparse prior with peaks at integer-ratio rhythms. However, the importance of different integer ratios varied across groups, often reflecting local musical practices. Our results suggest a common feature of music cognition: discrete rhythm 'categories' at small-integer ratios. These discrete representations plausibly stabilize musical systems in the face of cultural transmission but interact with culture-specific traditions to yield the diversity that is evident when mental representations are probed across many cultures.

SUBMITTER: Jacoby N

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11132990 | biostudies-literature | 2024 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries.

Jacoby Nori N Polak Rainer R Grahn Jessica A JA Cameron Daniel J DJ Lee Kyung Myun KM Godoy Ricardo R Undurraga Eduardo A EA Huanca Tomás T Thalwitzer Timon T Doumbia Noumouké N Goldberg Daniel D Margulis Elizabeth H EH Wong Patrick C M PCM Jure Luis L Rocamora Martín M Fujii Shinya S Savage Patrick E PE Ajimi Jun J Konno Rei R Oishi Sho S Jakubowski Kelly K Holzapfel Andre A Mungan Esra E Kaya Ece E Rao Preeti P Rohit Mattur A MA Alladi Suvarna S Tarr Bronwyn B Anglada-Tort Manuel M Harrison Peter M C PMC McPherson Malinda J MJ Dolan Sophie S Durango Alex A McDermott Josh H JH

Nature human behaviour 20240304 5

Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random 'seed' rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of 'telephone'), such that their biases (the prior) could be estimated from the distribution of reproductions. ...[more]

PMID: 38438653

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Project description:Mental health services need reliable and valid instruments to measure mental health recovery outcomes, and the only available one in Spanish is arduous. Adapting an instrument is more efficient than creating a new one as it enables international comparison research. The aim of this study was to conduct a cross-cultural adaptation of the 15-item Questionnaire about the Process of Recovery. Fifty-four participants engaged in a five-stage systematic and standardized process carried out from November 2019 to November 2020. Professional translators (n = 4) from the Translation Service Center for Foreign Languages of the Universidad de Alcalá participated in the direct translation, synthesis and back translation stages, and mental health professionals (n = 33) and service users (n = 17) from the Hospital Regional Universitario de Málaga and the Hospital Universitario Virgen de la Victoria in Andalucía (Spain), with an average of 19.2 (SD 12.86) years of experience in mental health, participated in the committee of experts and pilot debriefing stages. Additionally, legibility was assessed. Out of the 15-items of the questionnaire, three (20%) were equal amongst translations, three items (20%) of the back translations matched the original questionnaire and discrepancies identified were adapted accordingly. Seven items (46.7%) were approved online by experts and consensus of alternative translations was reached for the rest. The average time spent completing the questionnaire by service users during the face-to-face pilot was 4.12 min (SD 2.25). Internal consistency obtained was ω = 0.95 and α = 0.91. Debriefing findings reported the questionnaire as comprehensible (97.1%), adequate in wording (91.2%), formal in language (55.9%) and adequate in terms of length (100%). The questionnaire scored 65.53, 'normal' readability, on the Inflesz scale. The adapted instrument has conceptual, linguistic, cultural and metric equivalence to the original instrument.

Dataset Information

Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries.

Publications

Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries.

Similar Datasets

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