Luca Bonatti & Nuria Sebastian-Galles
Mila Bertolo (Harvard University)
Abstract
Why do we do music, and why does it have the structure it has? For example, why does infant-directed song exist in all societies (Mehr et al., 2019), and have features that are consistent cross-culturally (Moser et al., in revision) to the point where adults from across the globe are able to identify infant-directed song in cultures and languages foreign to their own (Mehr & Singh, 2018)? What could have caused this? Do adults learn to produce infant-directed song with similar features? Or are we predisposed to perceiving these features in a particular way? In this talk, I will present a recent paper (Bainbridge & Bertolo et al., 2020, Nature Human Behaviour) that finds that infants are also sensitive to the cross-culturally consistent features of infant directed song, in that they relax to them even when the songs are drawn from unfamiliar cultures and sung in unfamiliar languages by unfamiliar voices.
