alt Hacker NewsHumans everywhere seem wired to favour simple integer-ratio rhythms, but culture tweaks which rhythms become “natural.” This suggests a shared rhythm cognition backbone, yet enough flexibility to account for global musical diversity. The study is a solid counter to the claim that music structure is purely learned or arbitrary, while also showing culture doesn’t just ride on biology: it shapes what we actually use.
If you’re into music cognition, evolution of culture, or cognitive universals vs cultural diversity, this is the kind of data you want to see.
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I'm not an expert but I was just looking into this so I will leave this link here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_rhythm
If I understand it right, Toussaint's 2005 paper showed that many common rhythms across world music can be generated by distributing beats as evenly as possible. Some of the patterns in this newer research are Euclidean, but the broader finding is that people have a natural affinity for small-integer-ratio rhythms generally. So this is empirical evidence of why these mathematically simple patterns (including Euclidean rhythms) show up across world music.
> Humans everywhere seem wired to favour simple integer-ratio rhythms
That's what people write in the sheet music, but reality is more complicated than that. Notably in swung rhythms ratios are blurry (and dependent on BPM) and specific performers in band will play different ratios at the same time (e.g. drummer will play straighter, soloist will swing more).
And a strong tendency for integer ratios in chords. So is this about compressibility?
I don't think it's only humans. All kinds of animals would benefit from knowing that awhoo comes from a wolf and that, in this example, awhoo awhoo is the same sound coming from the same wolf or that an animal recognizes that the first awhoo comes from one wolf and the second awhoo from another wolf.
It also helps for an animal to know the volume of these awhoos as it is a good proxy for closeness, and therefore danger. It's even a good thing to know the rhythm of these awhoos as it helps again to assess if these wolves, or wolf, is on the move while awhooing or on the move between awhoos.
And this is just one example I'm currently making up bit at least makes sense that for many animals: tempo, volume, rhythm, patterns in sound, it's needed for survival. So evolution will select for it.
Music is a lot more than just those things I think, but it at least shows some evolutionary backbone as to why I believe that more animals have been evolved to like music. At least, some elephants sure seem to enjoy a good piano [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFIT87yPNYk