Une lectrice nous signale: Deux universitaires montréalais découvrent chez les Pygmés du Congo que la musique n’est peut-être pas une langue universelle.
(…) On a trip to Congo, anthropologist Nathalie Fernando of the University of Montreal played 11 excerpts of Western songs to 40 Pygmies. Some songs, such as “Cantina,” trigger positive feelings in Westerners. Others, like the Psycho theme or Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, trigger negative or sad feelings in Westerners.
But the Pygmies didn’t hear the music that way.
The emotional cues in songs, which Westerners pick up on, didn’t mean the same to the Pygmies: They didn’t hear the shrieking strings of the Psycho theme as stressful or the minor chords in Wagner’s Tristan as sad.
“The emotional response to this music was all over the map,” says neuroscientist Stephen McAdams of McGill University, who co-authored the study with Fernando. “The idea of music being a universal language, I don’t really buy it. Some aspects of the emotional response are very specific to that culture.”