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.

Music segmentation is a widely researched topic within music perception. Even though there is extensive data on the role of surface structure features and music training (e.g., Deliège, 1987) in segmentation, not much is known yet about the influence of implicit knowledge-based features acquired through musical enculturation. The goal of our study was to fill this gap. Makam music-trained musicians, nonmusicians, and Western listeners marked their segmentations online as they listened to mostly 19th century, unfamiliar Turkish makam tunes, all recorded in a Qānūn timbre on MIDI with retained microtonal structure. In addition, two experts segmented the tunes in a free-time setting. We found considerable within- and across-group agreement, as well as good agreement with the expert segmentations. After transforming each participant’s segmentations into “hits” and “false alarms” based on their match or mismatch with expert segmentations, we observed that musicians overlapped significantly more with expert segmentations than do the other two groups. Segmentations in all three groups were strongly driven by mostly local surface features. Overall, our results are more supportive of a universality claim as proposed by the Gestalt school of psychology than an enculturation claim.

In Experiment 1, psychology experts and novices showed generation effects with both psychology-related and other words. In Experiment 2, music experts who were sports novices and sports experts who were music novices showed a generation effect in a recognition test for all words regardless of domain (music or sports). Moreover, the effect was greater for words from the subjects' "nonexpertise" area. In Experiments 3A and 3B, music experts showed a greater generation effect for sports words than for music words in a free recall test but only when the sports and music words were studied together. These results are inconsistent with the semantic elaboration requirement for the generation effect that predicts less of an effect, if any, with less familiar materials. Rather, they provide evidence for the idea that the generation effect is influenced by relative distinctiveness of the to-be-remembered items.

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