In every society where scientists have looked, they have found music. However, the specifics of how that music is produced and used varies across cultures. Within a single culture, individuals also vary in their abilities and affinity for creating and responding to music. Building upon these generalizations, two Reviews in our pages characterize human perception and responses to music.

In this issue, Snyder and colleagues review research addressing the perception of the basic rhythmic elements of music. Rhythmic elements include rhythm, beat and metre, which listeners perceive from a series of auditory events such as notes or drum hits. Metre — the most complex of these elements — is the structure that enables groups of individuals to coordinate when playing instruments, dancing or singing. Perception of rhythm can be measured through tasks such as clapping along to music or reproducing a beat. Basic sensitivity to these rhythm elements can be seen in the first year of life, but rhythm perception continues to mature throughout adulthood.

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Within this developmental trajectory, individuals vary in their responses to rhythmic elements, and some of this variability is culturally specific. Cultures differ in the prevalent rhythm patterns in their musical traditions, and listeners tend to be best at perceiving and reproducing rhythms that are similar to those they have experienced. For instance, listeners who have been enculturated to Western music tend to prefer the moderate amounts of syncopation that characterize these broad musical traditions, whereas listeners with more familiarity with the musical traditions of Turkey, Mali and Uruguay, which contain more syncopation, prefer and more accurately perceive more syncopation in music.

Snyder and colleagues also highlight a genome-wide association study that revealed that multiple genomic loci contribute to beat synchronization. These complex genetic factors interact with experience over an individual’s lifetime and underlie individual differences among people and changes within a person across development.

Moving beyond perception of basic rhythm elements, a Review by Singh and Mehr (M. Singh and S. A. Mehr, Nat. Rev. Psychol. 2, 333–346; 2023) takes up the question of whether psychological responses to music, including emotional responses (such as evoked feelings of sadness or fear), behavioural responses (such as the urge to dance or clap along) and high-level labels (such as identifying a song as a lullaby), are shared across cultures. They conclude that many responses to music are shared across domains. For instance, emotional responses to music rely on the same mechanisms as emotional responses to facial expressions and speech. However, the early emergence of responses to music and high agreement across cultures in recognizing the function of music suggest some degree of universal human adaptation to music.

Singh and Mehr also highlight the role of cultural transmission in music. For instance, the rhythms that people find easiest to identify and reproduce might lead to those rhythms being adopted, reinforced and made prominent within a culture. When people within that culture experience music with these features, it might then reinforce their perceptual biases. The extent to which some of these biases are based in human physiological constraints or cognitive universals would lead to similarities in the musical features that are promoted across cultures. Similar forces could jointly shape individuals’ psychological responses to music (favouring responses that are rewarding or effective) and a culture’s musical norms and practices.

Music scientists come from psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, music, genetics and computer science backgrounds; we hope researchers from each of these fields can find new insights in these Reviews. Both articles exemplify the interdisciplinary nature of music science in their author teams and the research that they review, leaning heavily on evidence from genetics and anthropology. Continued integration across fields of study will lead to a rich understanding of how humans perceive, use, and respond to music across the world.