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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 music,

then we really can't know whether these features come

from the experience or from the biological constraint.

Psychologist Norie Jacobi 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.

And so we traveled there by taking a canoe ride or taking a Cessna plane or a couple of hours on the track

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

The Chimone 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 Chamoni 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 US did recognize octaves, although musically trained

Westerners were better at it than those with no musical training.

And so what is exciting here is it highlights the importance of experience and exposure on the human mind.

The research is in the journal Current Biology.

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