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.jp. That's y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.JP. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on YACL.

This is Scientific American 60 Second Science. I'm Suzanne Bard.

Every culture around the world creates music. But what shapes our perception of music? Two candidates are the limits of the human brain and the exposure we've already had to music during our lives.

If we only test participants with experience with

Western music, then we really can't know whether these features come from the experience

or from the biological constraint. Psychologist Nori Jacoby of the Max Planck Institute for

Empirical Aesthetics. During the past few years, he and his colleagues have visited a remote area of Bolivia to investigate this question.

So we traveled there by taking a canoe ride or taking a Cessna plane or a couple of hours on a track.

Two communities that don't have running water or electricity.

The Chemone are an indigenous people who live in the Amazon basin.

We specifically recruited participants from the Bolivian Amazon because this participant

have relatively little exposure to Western music.

For example, octaves are a staple of Western music, but Chamonet musical instruments don't feature

them. As an acoustical phenomenon, an octave is defined as the interval in which

the vibrational frequency of the bottom note is half that of the top note. They're considered

the same note, an octave apart. For example, middle C and high C. For the study, Chimane participants were asked to listen to simple melodies and sing them back to the researchers.

This exercise revealed that the Chimani don't perceive tones that are an octave apart as the same note.

On the other hand, participants from the U.S. did recognize octaves, although musically trained

...