Wordcels vs. shape rotators: differences in musical composition styles, favoring melody vs. harmony, and modern vs. primitive humans

The wordcel vs. shape rotator discourse makes me feel like we're right back in the late 2000s heyday of psychometrics blogging. So what better contribution to make than a dive into the archive?

Here is the first post, as well as a follow-up post, showing that a group's average cognitive abilities profile (i.e. wordcels vs. shape rotators) predicts their musical compositional style. Namely, the more wordcel they are, the more they emphasize melody, and the more shape rotator they are, the more they emphasize harmony. Click on those ancient links, which still work unlike most links of their age, to see which groups were surveyed (teaser: one of them is Ashkenazi Jews).

Homo sapiens are distinguished by our linguistic faculties, so all of us are wordcels to some degree, and all musical traditions have some degree of melodic emphasis. Being a shape rotator is more of a holdover from our pre-linguistic hominid history, more animalistic or savage or primitive. Not every group has a lot of it, and not a lot of musical traditions emphasize harmony or the "vertical" aspect of music.

To throw out some new ideas since those posts from 15 years ago:

Looking around the animal world, it's unusual for them to employ melodies to the exclusion of harmonies -- songbirds being the only major exception. Typically their musical-ish vocalizations are more like layers stacked in a chorus, without much of a serial change in pitch, no elaborate riffs or phrases. Crickets chirping, wolves baying, even human-domesticated species like sheep baa-ing and cows moo-ing, and so on and so forth.

It makes me wonder whether spatial ability and harmonic music were gifted to certain human populations by the Neanderthal and Denisovan species (cousins of Neanderthals) with whom they interbred after leaving Africa. Those species were big-skulled, big-brained shape rotators with comparatively meager verbal abilities.

Sub-Saharan Africans have none of those non-human admixtures (they have a different archaic admixture, from within sub-Saharan Africa), and they're the least harmony-focused in making music. Perhaps something in their distinct musical traditions (polyrhythms?) owes something to the archaic species with whom they interbred as well, though we don't know so much about that one as we do about Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Although humans are distinguished by our verbal abilities, when taken too far to the extreme, we become disembodied minds, no longer corporeal bodies. It leads to Rube Goldberg machines that end up doing in their clever-silly creators. We need some degree of rootedness in our pre-linguistic animal past, in order for our lives to feel meaningful and fulfilling.

That's why New Age music is so heavy on the harmonic aspect of composition -- it's not just the inanimate ambient sounds that lack melody (rain falling, waves lapping, wind gusting, fire crackling, etc.), it's the "music" of other non-human creatures that are mostly layers of a chorus. Re-connect with the primitive animal within, by sliding that Gregorian chant disc into your CD player, as a chorus of raindrops comes to sing a lazy-day carol at your window...