Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random ‘seed’ rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of ‘telephone’), such that their biases (the prior) could be estimated from the distribution of reproductions. Every tested group showed a sparse prior with peaks at integer-ratio rhythms. However, the importance of different integer ratios varied across groups, often reflecting local musical practices. Our results suggest a common feature of music cognition: discrete rhythm ‘categories’ at small-integer ratios. These discrete representations plausibly stabilize musical systems in the face of cultural transmission but interact with culture-specific traditions to yield the diversity that is evident when mental representations are probed across many cultures.

音乐存在于每个已知的社会中，但因地而异。如果有的话，音乐认知的普遍性是什么？我们测量了 15 个国家 39 个参与者群体（涵盖城市社会和原住民）的节奏心理表征特征。听众再现随机的“种子”节奏；他们的复制作为刺激被反馈（就像在“电话”游戏中一样），这样他们的偏见（先验）就可以从复制的分布中估计出来。每个测试组都显示出稀疏先验，并在整数比节奏处出现峰值。然而，不同整数比的重要性因群体而异，通常反映了当地的音乐实践。我们的结果表明音乐认知的一个共同特征：小整数比例的离散节奏“类别”。这些离散的表征在面对文化传播时似乎稳定了音乐系统，但与特定文化的传统相互作用，产生了在跨多种文化探究心理表征时显而易见的多样性。