Are dance and lullabies hardwired into humans? A UC Davis study challenges the idea that they are universal, using 43 years of research with the Northern Aché to explore cultural variation in human behavior.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that there is an association between how songs sound and their place in our emotional lives. Sourcing songs from across the globe, Manvir Singh and his fellow researchers found that people from different types of societies can successfully identify a song’s type by how it sounds, regardless of the language of its words.