Music as a coevolved system for social bonding

Published: July 15, 2020

Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution musicality have focused mainly on value music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function unifies all these theories, enabled at larger scales than grooming other mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archaeology, anthropology, biology, musicology, psychology, neuroscience into a unified framework accounts biological cultural music. involves gene-culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors initially arose spread inventions had feedback effects due to their impact bonding. emphasize deep links between production, perception, prediction, reward arising repetition, synchronization, harmonization rhythms pitches, summarize empirical levels brain networks, physiological mechanisms, across cultures species. Finally, address potential criticisms testable predictions future research, including neurobiological bases relationships human music, language, animal song, domains. The (MSB) hypothesis provides most comprehensive theory date

Language: Английский

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Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries

Published: July 6, 2021

Music is present in every known society, yet varies from place to place. What, if anything, universal music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations rhythm 39 participant groups 15 countries, spanning urban societies and indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random ‘‘seed’’ rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as game “telephone”), such that biases (the prior) could be estimated distribution reproductions. Every tested group showed sparse prior with peaks at integer ratio rhythms. However, importance different ratios varied across groups, often reflecting local musical practices. Our results suggest common feature cognition – discrete “categories” small ratios. These likely stabilize systems face cultural transmission, but interact culture-specific traditions yield diversity evident when are probed many cultures.

Language: Английский

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Building sustainable global collaborative networks: Recommendations from music studies and the social sciences

Published: June 11, 2021

Global collaborative networks have been established in multiple fields to move beyond research that over-relies on “WEIRD” participants and consider central questions from cross-cultural epistemological perspectives. As researchers music the social sciences with experience building sustaining such networks, we participated a virtual symposium February 7, 2021. exchange knowledge, ideas, recommendations, an emphasis developing global investigate human music-making. We present 14 key take-home particularly regarding 1) enhancing representation of participants, 2) minimizing logistical challenges, 3) ensuring meaningful, reproducible comparisons, 4) incentivizing sustainable collaboration shared practices circumvent hierarchies. Two overarching conclusions are collaborations should attempt including diverse stake-holders, fundamentally re-evaluate nature credit attribution.

Language: Английский

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Agreement among human and automated transcriptions of global songs

Published: July 10, 2021

Cross-cultural musical analysis requires standardized symbolic representation of sounds such as score notation. However, transcription into notation is usually conducted manually by ear, which time-consuming and subjective. Our aim to evaluate the reliability existing methods for transcribing songs from diverse societies. We had 3 experts independently transcribe a sample 32 excerpts traditional monophonic around world (half cappella, half with instrumental accompaniment). 16 also pre-existing transcriptions created different experts. compared these human against one another 10 automatic music algorithms. found that can be sufficiently reliable (~90% agreement, κ ~.7), but current automated are not (<60% <.4). No method clearly outperformed others, in contrast our predictions. These results suggest improving cross-cultural critical diversifying MIR.

Language: Английский

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Anti-Colonial Strategies in Cross-cultural Music Science Research

Published: Jan. 14, 2022

This paper presents a critical analysis of ethical and methodological issues within cross-cultural music science research, including around community based participation, data sovereignty. Although such have long been discussed in social fields anthropology ethnomusicology, psychology cognition are only beginning to take them into serious consideration. aims fill that gap the literature, draw attention necessity critically considering how implicit cultural biases pure positivist approaches can mar scientific investigations music, especially context. We focus initially on two previous papers (Jacoby et al., 2020; Savage 2021) before broadening our discussion critique provide alternatives support assimilation, extractvism, universalism. then discuss considerations research ethics, ownership, open reproducibility. Throughout critique, we offer many personal recommendations researchers, suggest few larger systemic changes.

Language: Английский

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The Interactive Digital Transcription and Analysis Platform (IDTAP): Enabling the Computational and Heuristic Analysis of Sound, Music, and the Social

Published: April 11, 2024

This paper outlines the historical background, motivation, development process, and potential impact of a new interactive digital transcription analysis platform (IDTAP): The IDTAP is web-based application that enables users to digitally transcribe, archive, share, analyze audio recordings oral melodic traditions. In 2023, authors principal investigators Dard Neuman Jon Myers launched version 1.0 platform, disseminated it globally, cultivated an initial base users. Whereas has been built around Hindustani music (i.e., North Indian classical music), principles, contour archetypes, technologies, methodologies behind are designed expand other traditions where continuous movements accentuated. expansion IDTAP, in turn, opens multiple recorded sound collections archives preservation, musical creation, as well statistical, quantitative, interpretive analysis, equipping scholars from range disciplinary backgrounds apply power twenty-first-century computational large datasets humanistic endeavors.

Language: Английский

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Studying Large Plainchant Corpora Using chant21

Published: Oct. 9, 2020

We present chant21, a Python package to support the plainchant formats gabc and Volpiano in music21, two large corpora of plainchant. The CantusCorpus contains over 60,000 medieval melodies collected from Cantus database, encoded typeface. GregoBaseCorpus 9,000 transcriptions more recent chant books format. Chant21 converts both while retaining textual structure chant: its division sections, words, syllables neumes. case studies. First, we report evidence for melodic arch hypothesis GregoBaseCorpus. Second, analyze connections between differentiæ antiphon openings CantusCorpus, show that systematicity connection can be quantified using an entropy-based measure.

Language: Английский

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Automatic acoustic analyses quantify variation in pitch discreteness within and between human music, speech, and bird song

Published: July 13, 2020

Scientists studying music and evolution often discuss similarities differences between music, language, bird song, but few studies have simultaneously compared these three domains quantitatively. One of the striking features considered to distinguish from speech is pitch discreteness. Here we devised two approaches for quanti- fying discreteness measured its correlation human ratings. We utilized a small subset 9 recordings speech, song selected maximize variation within domains. Our quantitative analyses confirmed that both methods achieved substantial correlations with subjective ratings (r = -0.6). However, suggest judgment does not necessarily correlate “flatness” fundamental frequency (F0) contours potentially due some non-linear or cognitive factors involved in perception. study suggests it could be useful acoustic perceptual discreteness, analogous distinction F0 perceived pitch. also identify areas need future development such as automated note segmentation.

Language: Английский

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Human vs. automated judgements of cross-cultural musical similarity

Published: Aug. 29, 2018

Although MIR has demonstrated great success in automatic analysis of Western music, no study tested algorithms against perceptual ground-truth data for a global musical sample. It thus remains unknown whether can be meaningfully applied to automatically compare diverse music from around the world. In this pilot study, we aim establish ground truth on similarity between recordings across world and use test accuracy existing audio algorithms. Preliminary results (two participants, ten recordings) suggest that ratings are significantly correlated but these similarities only weakly with measured by an algorithm. While is consistent more pessimistic assessments MIR’s current ability accommodate non-Western hypothesize collecting data, comparing algorithms, creating new based universal theories will enable meaningful all world’s within near future. This would have important implications our understanding cross-cultural diversity, including applications domains such as recommendation cultural heritage preservation.

Language: Английский

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Sampling criteria and recording quality influence relaxation responses to lullabies

Published: Aug. 9, 2021

The original paper’s sampling criteria involved selecting lullabies that adults rated as most likely to soothe a baby and non-lullabies least do so. Our analysis shows in the stimulus set had systematically higher recording quality than non-lullabies, those differences were substantially greater primary pre-registered comparing infant heart rate when listening vs. (original effect size: d=0.23). Accordingly, authors’ conclusion infants relax more response unfamiliar foreign may be an artefact of their methods.

Language: Английский

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