Why is music found in every culture? It has something to do with our relationship to the physical world, says new research. “Human musical preferences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algorithms or ratios but by the messy sounds of real life, and of speech in particular — which in turn is shaped by our evolutionary heritage. Says Schwartz, “The explanation of music, like the explanation of any product of the mind, must be rooted in biology, not in numbers per se.”