Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech: A Registered Report.

Both music and language are found in all known human societies, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we analyzed two global datasets: (i) 300 annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of traditional songs, recited lyrics, conversational speech, and instrumental melodies from our 75 coauthors speaking 55 languages; and (ii) 418 previously published adult-directed song and speech recordings from 209 individuals speaking 16 languages. Of our six preregistered predictions, five were strongly supported: Relative to speech, songs use (i) higher pitch, (ii) slower temporal rate, and (iii) more stable pitches, while both songs and speech used similar (iv) pitch interval size and (v) timbral brightness.

Sequence alignment of folk song melodies reveals cross-cultural regularities of musical evolution.

Culture evolves, but the existence of cross-culturally general regularities of cultural evolution is debated. As a diverse but universal cultural phenomenon, music provides a novel domain to test for the existence of such regularities. Folk song melodies can be thought of as culturally transmitted sequences of notes that change over time under the influence of cognitive and acoustic/physical constraints.