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It's been said that music is a universal language, and now a new study claims that it really does cut across cultures.

Researchers found that whether you are a pygmy in the Congolese rainforest or a hipster in London, aspects of music move us in the same way.

Certain combinations of notes from popular pieces of music heard in films, for example, made people from different cultures feel similarly calm or excited.

Researchers found that whether you are a pygmy in the Congolese rainforest or a hipster in London, aspects of music move us in the same way, making us either feel excited (illustrated with a stock image) or calm

Researchers from Technische Universität Berlin, the University of Montreal and McGill University in Montreal, Canada, came to their conclusion after travelling deep into the rainforest to play music to Mbenzélé Pygmies - an isolated group of people without access to radio, TV or electricity.

They compared how the Mbenzélé responded both to their own and to unfamiliar Western music, as well as the way that a group of Canadians reacted to the same pieces.

The team discovered that although the groups felt differently about whether specific pieces of music made them feel good or bad, they agreed upon whether the music made them feel calm or excited, according to the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

In the experiment, the researchers played clips of 11 western and eight pygmy melodies of between 30 and 90 seconds long.

Researchers from Technische Universität Berlin, the University of Montreal and McGill University in Canada, came to their conclusion after travelling deep into the rainforest to play music to Mbenzélé Pygmies (shown) - an isolated group of people without access to radio, TV or electricity

The western music - which included orchestral movements and excerpts from the films, Psycho, Star Wars and Schindler's List - was designed to induce a range of emotions, including calm, excited, happy, anxious and sad.

The pygmy pieces were all upbeat polyphonic vocal pieces that are intended to be performed in ceremonial contexts.

A total of 40 pygmies in the Congo who sing regularly for ceremonial purposes and 40 Canadian musicians in Montreal were asked to display emoticons with smiling or frowning faces to show whether the music made them feel good or bad.

Researchers also asked the participants to rate whether the music made them feel calm or excited.

As they listened to the music, measurements were taken to record the participants' rates of respiration, heart rates and the amount of sweat on their palms.

'Our major discovery is that listeners from very different groups both responded to how exciting or calming they felt the music to be in similar ways,' said Dr Hauke Egermann, of Technische Universität in Berlin.

'This is probably due to certain low-level aspects of music such as tempo, pitch and timbre, but this will need further research.' 

He noted that the Canadian musicians described feeling a wider range of emotions as they listened to the western music, compared with the pygmy singers, who did not feel as many when listening to either type of music. 

Dr Egermann suggests this could be because of the varying roles that music plays in each culture. 

Researchers also asked the participants to rate whether music - including a clip from Star Wars (stock image shown) made them feel calm or excited. As they listened to the music, measurements were taken to record the participants' rates of reparation, heart rates, and the amount of sweat on their palms

Professor Nathalie Fernando, of the University of Montreal's Faculty of Music, said: 'Negative emotions are felt to disturb the harmony of the forest in pygmy culture and are therefore dangerous.

'If a baby is crying, the Mbenzélé will sing a happy song.

'If the men are scared of going hunting, they will sing a happy song - in general music is used in this culture to evacuate all negative emotions, so it is not really surprising that the Mbenzélé feel that all the music they hear makes them feel good.'

Stephen McAdams, of McGill University's Schulich School of Music, added: 'People have been trying to figure out for quite a while whether the way that we react to music is based on the culture that we come from or on some universal features of the music itself.

'Now we know that it is actually a bit of both.'

JAZZ MAY BE A FORM OF LANGUAGE: BRAINS OF IMPROVISING MUSICIANS WORK IN THE SAME WAY AS WHEN PEOPLE THINK ABOUT WORDS 

The brains of improvising jazz musicians - such as Jamie Cullum - 'light up' in areas usually associated with words, a study revealed in June

The brains of improvising jazz musicians 'light up' in areas usually associated with words, researchers revealed in June.

Jazz players engrossed in spontaneous musical improvisations showed activity in areas of the brain traditionally associated with spoken language and syntax - used for deciphering phrases and sentences.

However, this musical conversation shut down brain areas linked to semantics, which process the meaning of spoken language, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

The scientists used MRI scanners to track the brain activity of jazz musicians in the act of 'trading fours' - a process in which musicians participate in spontaneous back and forth instrumental exchanges, which usually last for four bars at a time.

Dr Charles Limb, an associate professor in the Department of Otolaryngology at the university's School of Medicine said: 'We've shown in this study that there is a fundamental difference between how meaning is processed by the brain for music and language.

'Specifically, it's syntactic and not semantic processing that is key to this type of musical communication. Meanwhile, conventional notions of semantics may not apply to musical processing by the brain.'