Regardless of whether it is an African tribal dance or a solo sense of jazz played by a saxophonist, the language of music conveys a number of basic common emotions that anyone recognizes, even if it is the first time they hear a certain type of music. music, a study led by Thomas Fritz of the Max Planck Institute (Germany) recently demonstrated.
Specifically, the researchers worked with members of the Mafá ethnic group, from Cameroon, who made them listen to Western songs of styles totally unknown to them. This is how they identified three common emotions that music manages to transmit to any individual: happiness, sadness and fear . "We have shown that the language of music is universal , as is the recognition of human facial expressions," concluded Fritz and his colleagues in the journal Current Biology .
