Listen And Guess: Can You Tell A Lullaby From A Dance Song?
To see if music really is a universal language, researchers gave people 14 second samples of songs from around the world and asked them to say what kind of song it is.
Imagine the following experiment: you choose people at random and play snippets of songs they've never heard. A grocery clerk in Illinois listens to an 8th century Berber ballad. A child in Beijing listens to Childish Gambino.
How would listeners react? Would they immediately recognize something universal, say "Oh, this song is clearly for dancing!" Or would the differences in musical style and language leave people confused?
Experts disagree on the answer. Psychologists and cognitive scientists lean toward the universality of
