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We all dance to the same beat, according to a new study.

After analyzing music from around the world, researchers and found that songs tend to share features, including a strong rhythm, that trigger coordination in social situations and boost group bonding.

Researchers said the latest findings suggest that music is powerful in helping bond societies together.

"Our findings help explain why humans make music. The results show that the most common features seen in music around the world relate to things that allow people to coordinate their actions, and suggest that the main function of music is to bring people together and bond social groups -- it can be a kind of social glue," researcher Dr Thomas Currie from the University of Exeter said in a news release.

"In the West we can sometimes think of music as being about individuals expressing themselves or displaying their talent, but globally music tends to be more of social phenomena. Even here we see this in things like church choirs, or the singing of national anthems. In countries like North Korea we can also see extreme examples of how music and mass dance can be used to unite and coordinate groups," he added.

After analyzing 304 recordings of stylistically diverse music from all over the world, researcher found dozens of statistical similarities, including pitch, rhythm, social context and interrelationships between musical features.

"In the old days, Western people believed that Western scales were universal. But then when we realized that other cultures had quite different ideas about scales, that led some people to conclude that there was nothing universal about music, which I think is just as silly. Now we've shown that despite its great surface diversity, most of the music throughout the world is actually constructed from very similar basic building blocks and performs very similar functions, which mainly revolve around bringing people together," lead author Pat Savage, a PhD student from the Tokyo University of the Arts, said in a news release.

"My daughter and I were singing and drumming and dancing together for months before she even said her first words. Music is not a universal language... music lets us connect without language," he added.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).