Two Minds Blog

  In my last post, I asked whether mathematics might serve as a universal language. (TLDR version: I thought the answer was yes, but with some qualifications). In a companion piece this week, I will examine a different  candidate that is sometimes proposed as a universal language -- music.  A 2019 ethnographic study  by Mehr and colleagues found that some form of music exists in all known human cultures. However, the function and impact of music varies from one society to another. The authors of the study identified three factors that can be used to differentiate the role of music across cultures: (a) formality of the performance, (b) arousal level, and (c) religiosity.  Most societies have multiple types of music, or music that varies within several of these dimensions. However, about a third of societies are atypical, and use music in more circumscribed ways. For example, in Mehr et al.'s study the Kanuri people of eastern Africa were found to have musical tra...

  Mathematics is sometimes described a " universal language ," because its concepts are the same across all times and cultures. People were so sure of this that they used mathematics as a way to communicate with potential alien readers on the golden record of the Voyager space probe: Starting from the width of a hydrogen atom (the most common element in the universe), the record explains successively larger units of measurement, eventually working up to the location of Earth in the universe based on the positions of a series of pulsar stars relative to the Andromeda galaxy where the probe is eventually headed. This precision of mathematical measurements also can be used to estimate the scientific knowledge of different cultures, as in a widely cited passage from the Bible that allows one to calculate pi (roughly) from the dimensions of a basin in Solomon's temple. The more precise a culture's measurements, the more scientifically advanced it is understood to be. Pla...