Just the sounds of the 1960 movie thriller Psycho may be enough to get your heart racing. Even when we may not be aware it, hearing music can affect our bodies as well as our minds. But are the physiological effects of music unique to one culture or are they more general? To find out, researchers enlisted 40 Canadians from downtown Montreal and 40 Pigmies from the Congo rainforest. All the volunteers listened to musical clips from the movies Psycho, Star Wars and Schindler’s List and to music from Pigmy culture. As the participants listened, the researchers observed their emotional reactions as well as psychophysiological responses like changes in heart rate, breathing rate and palm sweat production. The two groups disagreed about whether a particular musical selection was happy or sad, but they all had similar levels of arousal as measured by their psychophysiological responses. These findings suggest that some aspects of how we react to music are universal rather than strictly cultural. The study is in the journal Frontiers in psychology. Fundamental acoustic features including tempo, pitch and timbre seem to be responsible for the similar responses of the Canadians and the Congolese Pigmies. Does that finding mean that science can help create the world’s most universally infectious pop song? On that front, science may be behind Pharrell Williams.

Thanks for the minute for Scientific American 60 seconds science. I’m Andrea Alfano.