You know what’s sad.  Specialization which apparently leaves one bereft of thinking faculties:

“Music and Speech Based on Human Biology

Music Appreciation Stems From Our Need to Understand Emotion

 

DURHAM, N.C. — A pair of studies by Duke University neuroscientists shows powerful new evidence of a deep biological link between human music and speech.

 

The two new studies found that the musical scales most commonly used over the centuries are those that come closest to mimicking the physics of the human voice, and that we understand emotions expressed through music because the music mimics the way emotions are expressed in speech. Composers have long exploited the perception of minor chord music as sad and major chord music as happy, now the Duke team thinks they know why.”

 

So far the quoted article is not very controversial.  Speech and music are based on human biology as opposed to…  what?  I’d be a bit more credulous of this first paper if the authors seemed to understand the difference between scales, which are a collection of seven of the twelve Western temperament semi-tones and modes, which have an aesthetic/emotional quality based on the order in which those seven notes are played.  Major and Minor “scales” are actually modes.  Are they trying to say that we sequence vowel frequencies according to Major or Minor modes?  The scales used wouldn’t matter at all.

 The article continues on to discuss a second paper:

“In a second paper appearing Dec. 3 in the online journal PLOS One, Kamraan Gill, another member of the team, found the most commonly used musical scales are also based on the physics of the vocal tones humans produce.

‘There is a strong biological basis to the aesthetics of sound,’ Purves said. ‘Humans prefer tone combinations that are similar to those found in speech.’…Though they only worked with western music and spoken English, there is reason to believe these findings are more widely applicable. Most of the frequency ratios of the chromatic musical scale can be found in the speech of a variety of languages. Their analysis included speakers of Mandarin Chinese, said Duke neuroscience graduate student Daniel Bowling, who is the first author on the JASA paper, and this showed similar results.”

 

To be fair, click through the link above and read the entire article for yourselves and perhaps read the papers.  You really needn’t, though.  A cursory examination of the above quotes and a basic familiarity with music will show that these researchers apparently forgot to consult with anyone who actually understands music or language before leaping to conclusions.

They “only worked with western music and spoken English” and they believe they’ve identified a basic biological root for aesthetic preferences for musical modes?  Is this a joke or are they seriously that culturally benighted to think that one can infer from this sample set anything whatsoever about humankind?

Let’s take a look at wikipedia’s List of languages by number of native speakers.  There are 644,600,000 native speakers of Hindi, Urdu, Arabic and Bengali alive on this planet at the moment.  Do the authors think that the cultures associated with these languages compose primarily in the Major mode?  None of them even uses Western 12-tone equal temperament.

Making assertions about music is one thing, but it’s quite another to be making assertions about biologically-innate characteristics of natural languages.  As anyone with even the tiniest, most superficial aqcuaintance with linguistics would know.  There are about 820 languages spoken in Papua New Guinea, many of which are Austronesian tongues but some of which are isolates, unrelated to any other known language group.  OSV and OVS word order were once thought impossible in a natural human language.  Check out Linguistics 201: Typology:

“OVS (A dragon killed he.) is used by Hixkaryana and a few other Amazonian languages. 

OSV (A dragon he killed.) is used by Apurina and a few other Amazonian languages. ”

Notably I am neither someone who uses Western music theory much nor am I a musicologist.  Nor have I attended a university, nor am I a linguist.  But a passing familiarity with the issues involved easily demolishes the idea that one can make universal assertions about human biology from the sparse data set that these researchers chauvenistically consider adequate.

Addendum:  here’s a apropos blog post from The Language Guy I randomly came across while searching about irately.