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Cohn (1996) and Taruskin (1985) consider the increasing prominence during the nineteenth century of harmonic progressions derived from the hexatonic and octatonic pitch collections respectively. This development is clearly evident in music of the third quarter of the century onwards and is a consequence of forces towards non-diatonic organization l...
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In this work, a coevolving memetic particle swarm optimization (CoMPSO) algorithm is presented. CoMPSO introduces the memetic evolution of local search operators in particle swarm optimization (PSO) continuous/discrete hybrid search spaces. The proposed solution allows one to overcome the rigidity of uniform local search strategies when applied to...
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Through the lens of memetic folk humor, this essay examines the slippery, ephemeral nature of hybridized forms of contemporary digital folklore. In doing so, it is argued that scholars should not be distracted by the breakneck speed in which expressive materials proliferate and then dissipate but should instead focus on the overarching ways that po...
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Citations
... While lexemes replicate under tighter syntactic and semantic constraints than musemes (in the sense that their mutation rate is limited to a greater extent by the imperatives of communication), it appears likely that, as segmented sound-units, they warrant consideration in similar ways to musemes. As with the origin, florescence and senescence of musical genres, styles, and systems of tonal organisation (Jan, 2013, p. 152, Fig. 1;Jan, 2015b), the notion of linguistic speciation -recognised by Franz Bopp before that in nature (J. Miller & Van Loon, 2010, p. 100) and adopted by Darwin as a means of illustrating biological speciation (Darwin, 2008, p. 311) ( §3.6)might be understood as a system-level consequence of the operation of the VRS algorithm upon the relevant unit of selection, the lexeme ( §7.5). ...
... I have covered elsewhere various aspects of memetics as it relates to music (Jan, 2007;Jan, 2010;Jan, 2011a;Jan, 2011b;Jan, 2012;Jan, 2013;Jan, 2014;Jan, 2016b;Jan, 2015b;Jan, 2016c;Jan, 2016a;Jan, 2018a;Jan, 2018b). The following discussion will serve as a very concise summary of some of the issues covered in these publications, and as an attempt to relate them to some of the ideas covered in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. By way of a starting-point, .8a ...
Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music by Steven Jan is a comprehensive account of the relationships between evolutionary theory and music. Examining the ‘evolutionary algorithm’ that drives biological and musical-cultural evolution, the book provides a distinctive commentary on how musicality and music can shed light on our understanding of Darwin’s famous theory, and vice-versa.
Comprised of seven chapters, with several musical examples, figures and definitions of terms, this original and accessible book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the relationships between music and evolutionary thought. Jan guides the reader through key evolutionary ideas and the development of human musicality, before exploring cultural evolution, evolutionary ideas in musical scholarship, animal vocalisations, music generated through technology, and the nature of consciousness as an evolutionary phenomenon.
A unique examination of how evolutionary thought intersects with music, Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music is essential to our understanding of how and why music arose in our species and why it is such a significant presence in our lives.
... The connection between Meyer and Gjerdingen's ^1-^7…^4-^3 schema (later renamed Meyer) and rare intervals was briefly suggested by Spitzer (2004). The tritone-resolution subschema in several schemata and its key-defining aspect is discussed by Jan (2013Jan ( , 2015 and in more detail in Rabinovitch (2018). The idea that the diatonic ^4-^7 tritone is central in tonality and its evolution is, of course, an old one (Fétis, 1840(Fétis, , 1844, but the changing usage of the interval within a subset of the common practice still requires some exploration: the peak of the schemata in the latter half of the eighteenth century may reveal something about a basic, evolving tonal feature. ...
This article examines in a preliminary fashion the potential connections between the usage of Gjerdingen's (1988, 2007) skeletal galant schemata, the heyday of the major mode during the period 1750-1799 (Albrecht & Huron, 2014; Horn & Huron, 2015), and the rare intervals of the diatonic set (Browne, 1981). I discuss the relations between the rarity of the tritone and semitone in the diatonic template and in musical usage (Huron 2006, 2008; David Temperley, personal communication, 2017). I hypothesize that the skeletal usage of schemata emphasizes rare intervals (tritone and semitone) respective to their common counterparts. Though this is predominantly an armchair, speculative inquiry, a preliminary pilot analysis of a small expert-annotated corpus from Gjerdingen (2007) provides tentative support for the hypothesis that the skeletal usage of schemata overemphasizes vertical tritones, but not melodic semitones. The prevalence of skeletal tritones in the schemata abstracted by Gjerdingen suggests that the process of abstraction is associated with finding unambiguous cues for a local tonal context. While the present article relies on Gjerdingen's expert analytical annotations of a small corpus and extraction of a contrapuntal skeleton, I conclude by offering hypotheses for future testing regarding the increased prevalence and salience of tritones on the musical surface in the period 1750-1799, a subset of common-practice tonality.
... Given the foregoing, while the statistical data on folk-song corpora edits of Savage (2017) are strong evidence in favor of cultural evolution, they should be regarded as epiphenomena of musemic-evolutionary processes-consequences of the changes which occur when discrete musical patterns are transmitted with copying errors and are differentially selected. To gain a deeper understanding of such statistical data, one must regard the mutational changes (conservation, substitution, insertion and deletion) as forces not only driving musemic mutation and, ultimately, musico-stylistic evolution (Jan, 2015), but also as forces constrained by the psychological realities of pattern-formation and propagation. That is, one must take into account two countervailing forces: (i) susceptibility to mutational pressures (perhaps engendered by weak perceptualcognitive demarcation and/or low intra-museme coherence) may distort a museme (resulting in high entropy; Margulis and Beatty, 2008), but may introduce a variant which has a higher perceptual-cognitive salience (Berlyne, 1971;Martindale, 1986), and therefore potentially greater replicative prospects, than its antecedent-Dawkins' "fecundity" (Dawkins, 1989, p. 194); and (ii) resistance to mutational pressures (perhaps engendered by strong perceptual-cognitive demarcation and/or high intra-museme coherence) may preserve multiple copies of a museme (resulting in low entropy), and may therefore foster an increase in its representation in the musemepool over time-Dawkins' "copying-fidelity" (Dawkins, 1989, p. 195). ...
While the “units, events and dynamics” of memetic evolution have been abstractly theorized (Lynch, 1998), they have not been applied systematically to real corpora in music. Some researchers, convinced of the validity of cultural evolution in more than the metaphorical sense adopted by much musicology, but perhaps skeptical of some or all of the claims of memetics, have attempted statistically based corpus-analysis techniques of music drawn from molecular biology, and these have offered strong evidence in favor of system-level change over time (Savage, 2017). This article argues that such statistical approaches, while illuminating, ignore the psychological realities of music-information grouping, the transmission of such groups with varying degrees of fidelity, their selection according to relative perceptual-cognitive salience, and the power of this Darwinian process to drive the systemic changes (such as the development over time of systems of tonal organization in music) that statistical methodologies measure. It asserts that a synthesis between such statistical approaches to the study of music-cultural change and the theory of memetics as applied to music (Jan, 2007), in particular the latter's perceptual-cognitive elements, would harness the strengths of each approach and deepen understanding of cultural evolution in music.
Steven Mithen argues that language evolved from an antecedent he terms “Hmmmmm, [meaning it was] Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic”. Owing to certain innate and learned factors, a capacity for segmentation and cross-stream mapping in early Homo sapiens broke the continuous line of Hmmmmm, creating discrete replicated units which, with the initial support of Hmmmmm, eventually became the semantically freighted words of modern language. That which remained after what was a bifurcation of Hmmmmm arguably survived as music, existing as a sound stream segmented into discrete units, although one without the explicit and relatively fixed semantic content of language. All three types of utterance – the parent Hmmmmm, language, and music – are amenable to a memetic interpretation which applies Universal Darwinism to what are understood as language and musical memes. On the basis of Peter Carruthers’ distinction between ‘cognitivism’ and ‘communicativism’ in language, and William Calvin’s theories of cortical information encoding, a framework is hypothesized for the semantic and syntactic associations between, on the one hand, the sonic patterns of language memes (‘lexemes’) and of musical memes (‘musemes’) and, on the other hand, ‘mentalese’ conceptual structures, in Chomsky’s ‘Logical Form’ (LF).
