[cynicalkane]

Like Chomsky's search for universal grammar, the search for music universals has been a failure. Nevertheless, there are some ideas that pop up surprisingly often. Doing a quick mental search, I believe every musical tradition I've heard that emphasizes accurate pitch, and at least one I've heard that doesn't, utilizes the pentatonic scale: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Pentatonic_sc...

[thesethings]

I wasn't aware that either of these quests for universals have been a failure. My friend did a relatively recent music thesis about universals.

I'm not in either field, but a belief in universal "deep structure" has helped me learn both language + music stuff. Even if they don't exist, I'm going to stick with what helps me :D

[cynicalkane]

Well, you could say music must have rhythm, yet there's music with almost no rhythm at all. You could say music is about melody, but there's lots of examples of music with no melody. And as I hinted above, there's cultures where notes don't really have definite pitches.

I can't really think of anything that universally defines "music", other than that it's sound with an aesthetically pleasing structure.

[hasenj]

> Chomsky's search for universal grammar (..) has been a failure

I don't know about Chomsky, but I took a linguistics course and the universal grammar was a major part of the course. It seems you're implying there's no such thing, what makes you think so? The impression I got from the course is that the idea of "universal grammar" is universally accepted (among linguists, of course).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory

Ironically I don't remember Chomsky's name coming up during the course at all.

[pessimizer]

Chomsky is the first name mentioned in that article.

[hasenj]

Yea, but I don't remember hearing about him in the course I took in the University.

Although to be honest I probably ignored names on purpose because there were so many of them.