J'ouvre les yeux au son d'une voix alors que l'avion bimoteur à hélices de Pakistan Airlines survole la chaîne de montagnes de l'Hindu Kush, à l'ouest du puissant Himalaya. Nous naviguons à 27 000 pieds, mais les montagnes qui nous entourent semblent étrangement proches et les turbulences m'ont réveillé lors d'un voyage de 22 heures dans l'endroit le plus reculé du Pakistan, les vallées Kalash de la région de Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

À ma gauche, une passagère désemparée prie tranquillement. Immédiatement à ma droite est assis mon guide, traducteur et ami Taleem Khan, membre de la tribu polythéiste Kalash qui compte environ 3 500 personnes. C'était l'homme qui me parlait alors que je me réveillais. Il se penche à nouveau et demande, cette fois en anglais :« Good morning, brother. Are you well ?

"Prúst," (je vais bien) je réponds, alors que je deviens plus conscient de mon environnement.

Il ne semble pas que l'avion descende; c'est plutôt comme si le sol se dressait à notre rencontre. Et après que l'avion ait touché la piste, et que les passagers aient débarqué, le chef du commissariat de police de Chitral est là pour nous accueillir. Une escorte policière nous est assignée pour notre protection (quatre agents opérant en deux équipes), car il existe des menaces bien réelles pour les chercheurs et les journalistes dans cette partie du monde.

Ce n'est qu'alors que nous pourrons embarquer pour la deuxième étape de notre voyage :une balade en jeep de deux heures vers les vallées de Kalash sur une route de gravier qui a de hautes montagnes d'un côté, et une chute de 200 pieds dans la rivière Bumburet de l'autre. Les couleurs intenses et la vivacité du lieu doivent être vécues pour être comprises.

L'objectif de ce voyage de recherche, mené par le Durham University Music and Science Lab, est de découvrir comment la perception émotionnelle de la musique peut être influencée par le contexte culturel des auditeurs et d'examiner s'il existe des aspects universels aux émotions véhiculées par la musique. . Pour nous aider à comprendre cette question, nous voulions trouver des personnes qui n'avaient pas été exposées à la culture occidentale.

Les villages qui doivent être notre base d'opérations sont répartis dans trois vallées à la frontière entre le nord-ouest du Pakistan et l'Afghanistan. Ils abritent un certain nombre de tribus, bien qu'à l'échelle nationale et internationale, ils soient connus sous le nom de vallées Kalash (du nom de la tribu Kalash). Malgré leur population relativement petite, leurs coutumes uniques, leur religion polythéiste, leurs rituels et leur musique les distinguent de leurs voisins.

Sur le terrain

J'ai mené des recherches dans des endroits comme la Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée, le Japon et la Grèce. La vérité est que le travail sur le terrain est souvent coûteux, potentiellement dangereux et parfois même mortel.

Mais aussi difficile qu'il soit de mener des expérimentations face aux barrières linguistiques et culturelles, l'absence d'approvisionnement stable en électricité pour recharger nos batteries serait parmi les obstacles les plus difficiles à surmonter pour nous lors de ce voyage. Les données ne peuvent être collectées qu'avec l'aide et la volonté des populations locales. Les personnes que nous avons rencontrées ont littéralement fait un effort supplémentaire pour nous (en fait, 16 miles supplémentaires) afin que nous puissions recharger notre équipement dans la ville la plus proche avec électricité. Il y a peu d'infrastructures dans cette région du Pakistan. La centrale hydroélectrique locale fournit 200 W à chaque foyer la nuit, mais elle est sujette à des dysfonctionnements dus à des épaves après chaque pluie, ce qui l'empêche de fonctionner tous les deux jours.

Une fois les problèmes techniques surmontés, nous étions prêts à commencer notre enquête musicale. Lorsque nous écoutons de la musique, nous comptons beaucoup sur notre mémoire de la musique que nous avons entendue tout au long de notre vie. Partout dans le monde, les gens utilisent différents types de musique à des fins différentes. Et les cultures ont leurs propres façons établies d'exprimer des thèmes et des émotions à travers la musique, tout comme elles ont développé des préférences pour certaines harmonies musicales. Les traditions culturelles façonnent les harmonies musicales qui transmettent le bonheur et, jusqu'à un certain point, la mesure dans laquelle la dissonance harmonique est appréciée. Pensez, par exemple, à l'humeur joyeuse de Here Comes the Sun des Beatles et comparez-la à la dureté inquiétante de la partition de Bernard Herrmann pour la tristement célèbre scène de la douche dans Psychose d'Hitchcock.

Ainsi, comme notre recherche visait à découvrir comment la perception émotionnelle de la musique peut être influencée par le contexte culturel des auditeurs, notre premier objectif était de localiser les participants qui n'étaient pas massivement exposés à la musique occidentale. C'est plus facile à dire qu'à faire, en raison de l'effet global de la mondialisation et de l'influence des styles musicaux occidentaux sur la culture mondiale. Un bon point de départ était de rechercher des endroits sans alimentation électrique stable et très peu de stations de radio. Cela signifie généralement une connexion Internet médiocre ou inexistante avec un accès limité aux plates-formes de musique en ligne, voire à tout autre moyen d'accéder à la musique mondiale.

L'un des avantages de notre emplacement choisi était que la culture environnante n'était pas orientée vers l'ouest, mais plutôt dans une sphère culturelle complètement différente. La culture punjabi est le courant dominant au Pakistan, car les Punjabi sont le plus grand groupe ethnique. Mais la culture Khowari domine dans les vallées Kalash. Moins de 2% parlent l'ourdou, la lingua franca du Pakistan, comme langue maternelle. Le peuple Kho (une tribu voisine des Kalash), au nombre d'environ 300 000, faisait partie du royaume de Chitral, un État princier qui faisait d'abord partie du Raj britannique, puis de la République islamique du Pakistan jusqu'en 1969. Le monde occidental est perçu par les communautés là-bas comme quelque chose de « différent », « étranger » et « pas le nôtre ».

Le deuxième objectif était de localiser les personnes dont la propre musique consiste en une tradition de performance autochtone établie dans laquelle l'expression de l'émotion par la musique se fait d'une manière comparable à l'ouest. En effet, même si nous essayions d'échapper à l'influence de la musique occidentale sur les pratiques musicales locales, il était néanmoins important que nos participants comprennent que la musique pouvait potentiellement véhiculer différentes émotions.

Enfin, nous avions besoin d'un endroit où nos questions pourraient être posées de manière à permettre aux participants de différentes cultures d'évaluer l'expression émotionnelle dans la musique occidentale et non occidentale.

Pour les Kalash, la musique n'est pas un passe-temps; c'est un identifiant culturel. C'est un aspect inséparable de la pratique rituelle et non rituelle, de la naissance et de la vie. When someone dies, they are sent off to the sounds of music and dancing, as their life story and deeds are retold.

Meanwhile, the Kho people view music as one of the "polite" and refined arts. They use it to highlight the best aspects of their poetry. Their evening gatherings, typically held after dark in the homes of prominent members of the community, are comparable to salon gatherings in Enlightenment Europe, in which music, poetry and even the nature of the act and experience of thought are discussed. I was often left to marvel at how regularly men, who seemingly could bend steel with their piercing gaze, were moved to tears by a simple melody, a verse, or the silence which followed when a particular piece of music had just ended.

It was also important to find people who understood the concept of harmonic consonance and dissonance—that is, the relative attractiveness and unattractiveness of harmonies. This is something which can be easily done by observing whether local musical practices include multiple, simultaneous voices singing together one or more melodic lines. After running our experiments with British participants, we came to the Kalash and Kho communities to see how non-western populations perceive these same harmonies.

Our task was simple:expose our participants from these remote tribes to voice and music recordings which varied in emotional intensity and context, as well as some artificial music samples we had put together.

Major and minor

A mode is the language or vocabulary that a piece of music is written in, while a chord is a set of pitches which sound together. The two most common modes in western music are major and minor. Here Comes the Sun by The Beatles is a song in a major scale, using only major chords, while Call Out My Name by the Weeknd is a song in a minor scale, which uses only minor chords. In western music, the major scale is usually associated with joy and happiness, while the minor scale is often associated with sadness.

Right away we found that people from the two tribes were reacting to major and minor modes in a completely different manner to our UK participants. Our voice recordings, in Urdu and German (a language very few here would be familiar with), were perfectly understood in terms of their emotional context and were rated accordingly. But it was less than clear cut when we started introducing the musical stimuli, as major and minor chords did not seem to get the same type of emotional reaction from the tribes in northwest Pakistan as they do in the west.

We began by playing them music from their own culture and asked them to rate it in terms of its emotional context; a task which they performed excellently. Then we exposed them to music which they had never heard before, ranging from West Coast Jazz and classical music to Moroccan Tuareg music and Eurovision pop songs.

While commonalities certainly exist—after all, no army marches to war singing softly, and no parent screams their children to sleep—the differences were astounding. How could it be that Rossini's humorous comic operas, which have been bringing laughter and joy to western audiences for almost 200 years, were seen by our Kho and Kalash participants to convey less happiness than 1980s speed metal?

We were always aware that the information our participants provided us with had to be placed in context. We needed to get an insider perspective on their train of thought regarding the perceived emotions.

Essentially, we were trying to understand the reasons behind their choices and ratings. After countless repetitions of our experiments and procedures and making sure that our participants had understood the tasks that we were asking them to do, the possibility started to emerge that they simply did not prefer the consonance of the most common western harmonies.

Not only that, but they would go so far as to dismiss it as sounding "foreign." Indeed, a recurring trope when responding to the major chord was that it was "strange" and "unnatural," like "European music." That it was "not our music."

What is natural and what is cultural?

Once back from the field, our research team met up and together with my colleagues Dr. Imre Lahdelma and Professor Tuomas Eerola we started interpreting the data and double checking the preliminary results by putting them through extensive quality checks and number crunching with rigorous statistical tests. Our report on the perception of single chords shows how the Khalash and Kho tribes perceived the major chord as unpleasant and negative, and the minor chord as pleasant and positive.

To our astonishment, the only thing the western and the non-western responses had in common was the universal aversion to highly dissonant chords. The finding of a lack of preference for consonant harmonies is in line with previous cross-cultural research investigating how consonance and dissonance are perceived among the Tsimané, an indigenous population living in the Amazon rainforest of Bolivia with limited exposure to western culture. Notably, however, the experiment conducted on the Tsimané did not include highly dissonant harmonies in the stimuli. So the study's conclusion of an indifference to both consonance and dissonance might have been premature in the light of our own findings.

When it comes to emotional perception in music, it is apparent that a large amount of human emotions can be communicated across cultures at least on a basic level of recognition. Listeners who are familiar with a specific musical culture have a clear advantage over those unfamiliar with it—especially when it comes to understanding the emotional connotations of the music.

But our results demonstrated that the harmonic background of a melody also plays a very important role in how it is emotionally perceived. See, for example, Victor Borge's Beethoven variation on the melody of Happy Birthday, which on its own is associated with joy, but when the harmonic background and mode changes the piece is given an entirely different mood.

Then there is something we call "acoustic roughness," which also seems to play an important role in harmony perception—even across cultures. Roughness denotes the sound quality that arises when musical pitches are so close together that the ear cannot fully resolve them. This unpleasant sound sensation is what Bernard Herrmann so masterfully uses in the aforementioned shower scene in Psycho. This acoustic roughness phenomenon has a biologically determined cause in how the inner ear functions and its perception is likely to be common to all humans.

According to our findings, harmonisations of melodies that are high in roughness are perceived to convey more energy and dominance—even when listeners have never heard similar music before. This attribute has an affect on how music is emotionally perceived, particularly when listeners lack any western associations between specific music genres and their connotations.

For example, the Bach chorale harmonization in major mode of the simple melody below was perceived as conveying happiness only to our British participants. Our Kalash and Kho participants did not perceive this particular style to convey happiness to a greater degree than other harmonisations.

The wholetone harmonization below, on the other hand, was perceived by all listeners—western and non-western alike—to be highly energetic and dominant in relation to the other styles. Energy, in this context, refers to how music may be perceived to be active and "awake," while dominance relates to how powerful and imposing a piece of music is perceived to be.

Carl Orff's O Fortuna is a good example of a highly energetic and dominant piece of music for a western listener, while a soft lullaby by Johannes Brahms would not be ranked high in terms of dominance or energy. At the same time, we noted that anger correlated particularly well with high levels of roughness across all groups and for all types of real (for example, the Heavy Metal stimuli we used) or artificial music (such as the wholetone harmonization below) that the participants were exposed to.

So, our results show both with single, isolated chords and with longer harmonisations that the preference for consonance and the major-happy, minor-sad distinction seems to be culturally dependent. These results are striking in the light of tradition handed down from generation to generation in music theory and research. Western music theory has assumed that because we perceive certain harmonies as pleasant or cheerful this mode of perception must be governed by some universal law of nature, and this line of thinking persists even in contemporary scholarship.

Indeed, the prominent 18th century music theorist and composer Jean-Philippe Rameau advocated that the major chord is the "perfect" chord, while the later music theorist and critic Heinrich Schenker concluded that the major is "natural" as opposed to the "artificial" minor.

But years of research evidence now shows that it is safe to assume that the previous conclusions of the "naturalness" of harmony perception were uninformed assumptions, and failed even to attempt to take into account how non-western populations perceive western music and harmony.

Just as in language we have letters that build up words and sentences, so in music we have modes. The mode is the vocabulary of a particular melody. One erroneous assumption is that music consists of only the major and minor mode, as these are largely prevalent in western mainstream pop music.

In the music of the region where we conducted our research, there are a number of different, additional modes which provide a wide range of shades and grades of emotion, whose connotation may change not only by core musical parameters such as tempo or loudness, but also by a variety of extra-musical parameters (performance setting, identity, age and gender of the musicians).

For example, a video of the late Dr. Lloyd Miller playing a piano tuned in the Persian Segah dastgah mode shows how so many other modes are available to express emotion. The major and minor mode conventions that we consider as established in western tonal music are but one possibility in a specific cultural framework. They are not a universal norm.

Why is this important?

Research has the potential to uncover how we live and interact with music, and what it does to us and for us. It is one of the elements that makes the human experience more whole. Whatever exceptions exist, they are enforced and not spontaneous, and music, in some form, is present in all human cultures. The more we investigate music around the world and how it affects people, the more we learn about ourselves as a species and what makes us feel .

Our findings provide insights, not only into intriguing cultural variations regarding how music is perceived across cultures, but also how we respond to music from cultures which are not our own. Can we not appreciate the beauty of a melody from a different culture, even if we are ignorant to the meaning of its lyrics? There are more things that connect us through music than set us apart.

When it comes to musical practices, cultural norms can appear strange when viewed from an outsider's perspective. For example, we observed a Kalash funeral where there was lots of fast-paced music and highly-energetic dancing. A western listener might wonder how it is possible to dance with such vivacity to music which is fast, rough and atonal—at a funeral.

But at the same time, a Kalash observer might marvel at the sombreness and quietness of a western funeral:was the deceased a person of so little importance that no sacrifices, honorary poems, praise songs and loud music and dancing were performed in their memory? As we assess the data captured in the field a world away from our own, we become more aware of the way music shapes the stories of the people who make it, and how it is shaped by culture itself.

After we had said our goodbyes to our Kalash and Kho hosts, we boarded a truck, drove over the dangerous Lowari Pass from Chitral to Dir, and then traveled to Islamabad and on to Europe. And throughout the trip, I had the words of a Khowari song in my mind:"The old path, I burn it, it is warm like my hands. In the young world, you will find me."