"As humanity emerged from the social isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, people craved human connection. Instead, we got generative artificial-intelligence programs, complete with hallucinating chatbots and deepfake songs. Yet, music from diverse sources does find ways to unite people around the world, from the animated musical film KPop Demon Hunters to Spanish singer Rosalía singing in 14 distinct languages on her album Lux and Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny performing in Spanish at the half-time show of the 2026 American Football Super Bowl LX."
"Nineteenth-century scholars, including Longfellow, Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin, were fascinated by music. Darwin described it as "among the most mysterious" faculties with which humans are endowed. And heated discussions continue to this day, regarding whether music bonds people together more than language does."
Post-pandemic social craving collided with rapid adoption of generative AI, producing hallucinating chatbots and deepfake songs even as diverse musical works continued to unite global audiences. Iconic examples include an animated KPop musical, Rosalía performing in fourteen languages, and Bad Bunny singing in Spanish at the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show. Nineteenth-century thinkers such as Longfellow, Spencer and Darwin probed music’s origins, uniqueness and relation to language. Contemporary research revisits those debates with cross-cultural and cross-species data and attempts to test musical universality scientifically, including historical methods that compared songs using multiple acoustic features.
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