Contributions to the problem of universals in music are scattered and often written within the framework of specific theories or problems. This is fundamentally at odds with what universals are supposed to achieve, namely to provide a universal basis for a theory of music that, before anything else, defines what is being talked about and offers generally accepted principles. It should also provide tools for comparing different theories of music.

However, considerations regarding possible definitions of music can at least be outlined in the form of an informal layered model, whose most general assumption would probably be: “Music has something to do with the properties of acoustic perception.” As can be seen, we are already on slippery ground here, because the obvious formulation “music is the conscious shaping of acoustic space” can no longer be taken as universal. It would eliminate all abstract, metaphysical speculation about spherical music and the like, and with it an immensely important part of Indian, Chinese, Western, and other music theories.

The higher one climbs in the layer model, the more certain universal postulates must be restricted to a framework theory. The most widespread is certainly the one that only speaks of music when referring to individual works with meter and tonal structure.

The British music psychologist John A. Sloboda explicitly reflects on universals in music. He discusses grouping structures that are also proposed as universals by Lerdahl and Jackendoff. Sloboda accepts the existence of a tone scale and a distinguished tone (e.g., tonic) as universal, at least for the duration of a performance. He sees one reason for this in the existence of instruments that, unlike the singing voice, have fixed pitches. Sloboda also agrees with the common belief that the octave is a distinguished interval and that most polyphonic cultures have intervals in the range of pure fourths and pure fifths.

In addition, he considers the unequal division of the octave space to be a common practice. More precisely, tone systems seem to arise when an unevenly distributed subset is selected from an even subdivision (twelve semitones or, as in India, 22 tone steps), which then forms a diatonic scale. The uneven distribution allows the listener to find their way around the tonal space more easily than in a uniform system in which all tone steps have the same quality. In addition, a system with multiple keys can be constructed on the basis of the uneven distribution. The diatonic scale allows, for example, the construction of a circle of fifths with modulations. The whole-tone scale has no such layering. According to Sloboda, the time dimension is also differentiated in a similar way in the music of all cultures (although he leaves open whether this is a necessary structuring). A regular pulse is structured by accents.

The discussion of this topic in Sloboda’s overview work “The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music” makes an astonishingly unsystematic and sometimes inconsistent impression – Sloboda quickly moves from a discussion of universals to stylistic questions. However, he is not alone in this. A distinction between structural, cognitive, theory-dependent, and theory-transcending universals is practically never made. Most authors limit themselves to a colorful collection of individual ideas.

This is also the case for Leonard Meyer in his article “A Universe of Universals”. However, the renowned American music psychologist explains right at the outset that, apart from the physical and biopsychological conditions already mentioned, there are basically no musical universals.

The biopsychological universals that Meyer himself contributes to the discourse fall under the loosely grouped categories of neurocognition, syntax, statistical parameters, classification, hierarchical structures, and redundancy. With regard to classification, however, he limits himself to a few general remarks on the significance of class formation, as represented by pitch classes, for example, without explicitly formulating a framework condition. Presumably, he has something like “all music makes use of structuring by means of classes of elements” in mind, but this is too vague to be included in our catalog.

Meyer does not really provide any framework conditions for hierarchies either. However, he is probably not entirely wrong in pointing out that since Schenker, two things have often been inadmissibly mixed, namely hierarchies in structures and what the Romantics regarded as “depth.” Schenker’s Ursatz is thus occasionally misunderstood as the deeper meaning of a piece of music and compared, for example, with the “profound” archetypes of Jungian psychology. Lerdahl and Jackendoff also warn against such a false conclusion in GTTM.

Meyer’s neurocognitive framework is as follows:

• The human brain can only process a certain amount of information per unit of time.
• The human brain has a specific processing speed.
• Broadly speaking, the human brain can relate seven plus/minus two elements at a time.

The latter explains the length of motifs, themes, and so on, and above all the fact that musical structures are not enlarged by making melodies longer, but by increasing their number:

Just as a building does not become larger because its components (posts and beams, bricks and nails) become larger, but because their number increases, and just as organisms do not grow by their cells becoming larger, but by their number increasing, a piece of music does not grow because its elements become larger, but because their number increases. Although Bruckner’s symphonic movements are much longer than Mozart’s, their motifs, phrases, themes, and so on are about the same length as those in Mozart’s symphonies.

Meyer refers to the structures that arise from the probability that one pitch event, one rhythm, or something else will follow another as syntax. The corresponding universals include the use of unequal intervals. Similarly, the temporal sequence of events of unequal length is populated. The framework conditions can be formulated as follows:

• Pitches are divided into discrete, proportional elements (scales).
• Time durations are also divided into discrete, proportional elements (whole, half, quarter, and so on).
• All other parameters have merely statistical values of distinction.

Lerdahl and Jackendoff present their hypotheses on musical universals as a five-point catalog.

• Musical intuition is structured by four dimensions postulated by GTTM: grouping, metric structure, time span reduction, and prolongation reduction. All these dimensions are strictly hierarchical.
• The structure of a piece is determined in each component by three types of interacting rules: those of well-formedness, preference, and transformation.
• The relationships between the four groups are as follows:
  • Grouping and metric structure are fundamentally independent.
  • Time span segmentation depends on the meter in the small scale and on groupings in the large scale, with a combination of the two playing a role in between.
  • Time span reduction depends on a combination of pitch stability and time span segmentation.
  • Prolongation regions and the relative importance of prolongations are largely determined by the significance of the time spans and the stability of the pitch connections.
• In order to make decisions about hierarchical positions, criteria for the relative stability of a pitch event must be available, i.e., a tonal center and a way of specifying the distance of a pitch event from it.
• Structural beginnings and endings of a group form important articulations of a piece’s structure. Endings are also produced by conventional phrases (“cadences”).