Music is a universal language. Or so musicians like to claim. “With music,” they’ll say, “you can communicate across cultural and linguistic boundaries in ways that you can’t with ordinary languages ...

Are acoustic features of music and spoken language shared across cultures? Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen have contributed to a global study of music and ...

Distinct, though neighboring, areas of the brain are activated when processing music and language, with specific sub-regions engaged for simple melodies versus complex melodies, and for simple versus ...

This article was taken from the August 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by ...

ONE OF THE liveliest debates in linguistics is over whether all languages share fundamental properties. If so, perhaps language is a universal feature of evolution. To find out, scholars have looked ...

Linguist and show-tune aficionado McWhorter (Losing the Race) explores why American language and music are no longer crafted, honored or even well-regarded means of expression. The expected social ...

West African “talking drums” known as dùndún can accurately replicate speech with a remarkable level of detail, new research finds. The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Communication, ...

Nearly everyone who has written about music from a scientific perspective has alluded to its possible relationship with language. The superficial resemblance is clear: music and language both combine ...

Music is a universal language. Or so musicians like to claim. “With music,” they’ll say, “you can communicate across cultural and linguistic boundaries in ways that you can’t with ordinary languages ...

Language and music may share evolutionary functions. Both speech and song have features such as rhythm and pitch. But are similarities and differences between speech and song shared across cultures?