Researchers set out to discover whether people everywhere prefer consonant intervals to dissonant ones. A few years ago they started testing the musical preferences of members of a remote Amazonian society called Tsimane. Its residents don’t have electricity or tap water, and the only way to get to the town is by canoe. This meant it was unlikely these people had been influenced by Western music, which made them excellent subjects for the study.

The scientists played a randomized set of intervals to more than 100 of the tribe’s residents and asked them to rate the pleasantness of each. “When we played them consonant and dissonant chords, they said they’re both equally pleasant,” explains Ricardo Godoy, another author of the study and professor of international development at Brandeis. “That was surprising.”

Surprising, because when the team administered the same test to college students back in the U.S., the results were drastically different. The American students overwhelmingly preferred consonant intervals to dissonant ones.