Strangers can guess what a song is for from just 14 seconds of unfamiliar music

A 2019 study played brief excerpts of songs from dozens of small-scale societies worldwide to thousands of online listeners who had never heard those specific cultures' music. Listeners reliably identified whether each clip was a dance song, lullaby, healing song or love song, well above chance, suggesting music's basic social functions are written into its form across cultures.

— Samuel A. Mehr, Manvir Singh, et al., Universality and Diversity in Human Song — Science, 2019