In asking whether or not there are meaningful universals in music, researchers compiled two catalogs – the Natural History of Song (NHS) Ethnography which contains ethnographic descriptions of song performances collected from eHRAF World Cultures, and the NHS Discography, which contains field recordings of performances of dance, healing, love, and lullaby. Using these two corpora, the study tests a variety of hypotheses about the universality and variability of both music behavior and music form. Specifically, whether there are meaningful universals in meaning and sound. The catalog of published sound recordings was analyzed by machine summaries, listener ratings, and manual transcriptions, which revealed that there were identifiable features of songs which could then predict their primary function cross-culturally. The results as a whole revealed that the existence of music is a cultural universal, and that the variation within music can be characterized by three factors assessing the formality, arousal, and religiosity of the song events. They also found that musical behavior varies more within societies than between them.

The authors develop CantoCore, an expansion of Lomax's Cantometrics scheme, in order to code for additional candidate musical universals. No musical feature occurs with absolute universality, but several features occur with statistically significant frequency after controlling for historical relatedness, and an additional set of features were found to be universally related to each other. The authors highlight the role of these features in human coordination and cohesion, as well as their their utility to the fields of musical cognition and evolution.

The author reanalyzes hypotheses proposed by Lomax et al. (1968) that are based on Lomax's collection of cantometric data. Considering historical/regional variables, the author suggests that difusion and common history better explain certain musical features such as wordiness than functional and evolutionary processes. However, other Lomax findings are supported involving interlocked, contrapuntal singing and narrow nasal-voiced singing.

This chapter examines the relationship between social cohesion (measured using variables like subsistence type, stable work teams, and settlement patterns) and musical cohesion. All hypotheses are supported.

The authors examine musical diversity in India using cantometric data from 32 Indian societies with the goal of better understanding how music varies between and within cultures. They find very minor musical differences between language families, greater diversity between societies but within language families, and the most variation within societies.

By analyzing patterns of between- and within-population musical variability among 16 Austronesian-speaking aboriginal groups, the researchers hope to evaluate degree of similarity to structures of human genetic diversity. As in the genetic domain, within-population variance is found to be much higher than between-population variance, leading the researchers to suggest that patterns of musical distance and divergence may serve as an indicator of cultural evolution.

This chapter tests the influences of physiological stressors during infancy on different aspects of musical behavior. Findings suggest that songs in societies where infantile stress is practiced will be characterized by stronger accents and a wider range.

Lullabies are often touted as universal to all human cultures, regardless of time and place. In order to test this axiom, this article examines all 186 societies in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, and codes them for the presence or absence of lullabies. The result ultimately hinges on the meaning of the word “lullaby”: when lullabies were defined as a strict and culturally conserved repertoire of songs sung to soothe infants, they were found to be neither a statistical nor even a “near” universal. However, when lullabies were defined as any type of singing used to soothe children, they were a near universal, with 96.8% of societies in the sample coded as having lullabies.

By testing relationships between musical, geographic, genetic, and linguistic distance among nine indigenous groups in Taiwan, the researchers aim to quantitatively evaluate a developing theory of coevolution between these traits. An especially strong correlation between musical variability and genetic distance suggests that music may possess worldwide time depth, diversity, and universality equal to or greater than that of language, and could thus serve as a complementary marker for reconstruction of long-term population shifts.

This paper hypothesizes that cross-cultural variation in rhythm is related to variation in infant carrying practices. Suggestions are made regarding the psychological origin of rhythm as well as the function and importance of music in human experience.