Universality and cross-cultural variation in mental representations of music revealed by global comparison of rhythm priors

Music is present in every known society, yet varies from place to place. What is universal to the perception of music? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 923 participants from 39 participant groups in 15 countries across 5 continents, spanning urban societies, indigenous populations, and online participants. 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 prior with peaks at integer ratio rhythms, suggesting that discrete rhythm “categories” at small integer ratios are universal. The occurrence and relative importance of different integer ratio categories varied across groups, often reflecting local musical systems. However, university students and online participants in non-Western countries tended to resemble Western participants, underrepresenting the variability otherwise evident across cultures. The results suggest the universality of discrete mental representations of music while showing their interaction with culture-specific traditions.