Patrick Savage

Keio University · Faculty of Environment and Information Studies

The standard theory of musical scales since antiquity has been based on harmony, rather than melody. Some recent analyses support either view, and we lack a comparative test on cross-cultural data. We address this longstanding problem through a rigorous, computational comparison of the main theories against 1,314 scales from 96 countries. There is...

The VocalNotes project investigated how expert traditional music listeners conceive of notes in vocal performances by studying similarities and differences in their transcriptions. Teams of experts from five musical traditions (Japanese folk song, Chinese bangzi opera, Russian traditional village singing, Alpine yodelling, and Romaniote Jewish chan...

Both music and language are found in all known human societies, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we analyzed two global datasets: (i) 300 annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of traditional songs, recited lyrics, conve...

Music is a universal yet diverse cultural trait transmitted between generations. The extent to which global musical diversity traces cultural and demographic history, however, is unresolved. Using a global musical dataset of 5242 songs from 719 societies, we identify five axes of musical diversity and show that music contains geographical and histo...

Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random ‘seed’ rhythms; their reproductions were fe...

Cross-cultural perception of musical similarity is important for understanding musical diversity and universality. In this study we analyzed cross-cultural music similarity ratings on a global song sample from 110 participants (62 previously published from Japan, 48 newly collected from musicians and non-musicians from north and south India). Our p...

Music copyright infringement lawsuits implicate millions of dollars in damages and costs of litigation. There are, however, few objective measures by which to evaluate these claims. Recent music information retrieval research has proposed objective algorithms to automatically detect musical similarity, which might reduce subjectivity in music copyr...

Music is an interactive technology associated with religious and communal activities and was suggested to have evolved as a participatory activity supporting social bonding. In post-industrial societies, however, music's communal role was eclipsed by its relatively passive consumption by audiences disconnected from performers. It was suggested that...

Music is an interactive technology associated with religious and communal activities and was suggested to have evolved as a participatory activity supporting social bonding. In post-industrial societies, however, music’s communal role was eclipsed by its relatively passive consumption by audiences disconnected from performers. It was suggested that...

What is a musical “note”? Previous analysis of cross-cultural transcription using Western staff notation suggest that disagreement about how to conceptualize a “note” is the main factor limiting transcription agreement and reliability. In min’yo (Japanese folk songs), melodies are traditionally highly ornamented and taught via oral transmission wit...

Global music diversity is a popular topic for both scientific and humanities researchers, but often for different reasons. Scientific research typically focuses on the generalities through measurement and statistics, while humanists typically emphasize exceptions using qualitative approaches. But these two approaches need not be mutually exclusive....

Which information dominates in evaluating performance in music? Both experts and laypeople consistently report believing that sound should be the most important domain when judging music competitions, but experimental studies of Western participants rating video-only vs. audio-only versions of 6-second excerpts of Western classical performances hav...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Music is a universal, diverse cultural trait shaped by cultural and biological evolution. The extent to which global musical diversity traces the historical movements of people and their cultures is unresolved, with regional studies producing mixed results. Using a global musical dataset of 5,242 songs and 719 societies we identify five axes of mus...

Many people experience emotions and visual imagery while listening to music. Previous research has identified cross-modal associations between musical and visual features as well as cross-cultural links between music and emotion and between music and visual imagery. However, few studies have simultaneously investigated cross-cultural links between...

Music and language are both forms of communication ubiquitously observed across human societies, prompting researchers to investigate why and how they evolved. While such research initially focused on the biological evolution of the capacities to create and perceive language and music, researchers increasingly emphasize the cultural evolution of la...

Global music diversity is a popular topic for both scientific and humanities researchers, but often for different reasons. Scientific research typically focuses on the generalities through measurement and statistics, while humanists typically emphasize exceptions using qualitative approaches. But these two approaches need not be mutually exclusive....

Both music and language are found in all known human societies, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we analyzed two global datasets: 1) 300 annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of traditional songs, recited lyrics, conver...

Standardized cross-cultural databases of the arts are critical to a balanced scientific understanding of the performing arts, and their role in other domains of human society. This paper introduces the Global Jukebox as a resource for comparative and cross-cultural study of the performing arts and culture. The Global Jukebox adds an extensive and d...

Cross-cultural perception of musical similarity is important for understanding musical diversity and universality. In this study we analyzed cross-cultural music similarity ratings on a global song sample from 110 participants (62 previously published from Japan, 48 newly collected from musicians and non-musicians from north and south India). Our p...

Music copyright lawsuits are worth millions of dollars, but there are few objective guidelines for applying copyright law in infringement claims involving musical works. Recent music information retrieval research has proposed objective algorithms that reduce subjectivity in music copyright decisions to automatically detect musical similarity, but...

The causes, consequences, and timing of the rise of moralizing religions in world history have been the focus of intense debate. Progress has been limited by the availability of quantitative data to test competing theories, by divergent ideas regarding both predictor and outcomes variables, and by differences of opinion over methodology. To address...

This Retake article presents a corrected and extended version of a Letter published in Nature (Whitehouse et al., 2019) which set out to test the Big Gods hypothesis proposing that beliefs in moralizing punitive deities drove the evolution of sociopolitical complexity in world history. The Letter was retracted by the authors in response to a critiq...

Music and language are both universal but diverse cultural traits shaped by cultural and biological evolution. However, there is disagreement on the relationships between music, language, and human history. Some argue that musical and linguistic similarities trace ancient migrations of people and their cultures, while others argue that they primari...

Culture evolves,1-5 but the existence of cross-culturally general regularities of cultural evolution is debated.6-8 As a diverse but universal cultural phenomenon, music provides a novel domain to test for the existence of such regularities.9-12 Folk song melodies can be thought of as culturally transmitted sequences of notes that change over time...

The universality and diversity of music in human societies make it an important research model for understanding how cultural features change over time and space. In this chapter, we review research on the cultural evolution of music, broken down into three major approaches: 1) corpus-based approaches that use large datasets to infer evolutionary p...

We compare and contrast the 60 commentaries by 109 authors on the pair of target articles by Mehr et al. and ourselves. The commentators largely reject Mehr et al.'s fundamental definition of music and their attempts to refute (1) our social bonding hypothesis, (2) byproduct hypotheses, and (3) sexual selection hypotheses for the evolution of music...

Which information dominates in evaluating performance in music? Both experts and laypeople consistently report believing that sound should be the most important domain when judging music competitions, but experimental studies comparing video-only vs. audio-only versions of performances have showed that in at least some cases visual information can...

The original paper’s sampling criteria involved selecting lullabies that adults rated as most likely to soothe a baby and non-lullabies rated as least likely to do so. Our analysis shows that lullabies in the stimulus set had systematically higher recording quality than non-lullabies, and those differences in recording quality were substantially gr...

We compare and contrast the 60 commentaries by 109 authors on the pair of target articles by Mehr et al. and ourselves. The commentators largely reject Mehr et al.’s fundamental definition of music and their attempts to refute 1) our social bonding hypothesis, 2) byproduct hypotheses, and 3) sexual selection hypotheses for the evolution of musicali...

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 is time-consuming and subjective. Our aim is to evaluate the reliability of existing methods for transcribing songs from diverse societies. We had 3 experts...

Music is present in every known society, yet varies from place to place. What is universal to the perception of music? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 923 participants from 39 participant groups in 15 countries across 5 continents, spanning urban societies, indigenous populations, and online participants. Listeners re...

Phylogenetic trees or networks representing cultural evolution are typically built using methods from biology that use similarities and differences in cultural traits to infer the historical relationships between the populations that produced them. While these methods have yielded important insights, researchers continue to debate the extent to whi...

Culture evolves in ways that are analogous to, but distinct from, genomes. Previous studies examined similarities between cultural variation and genetic variation (population history) at small scales within language families, but few studies have empirically investigated these parallels across language families using diverse cultural data. We repor...

Global collaborative networks have been established in multiple fields to move beyond research that over-relies on "WEIRD" participants and to consider central questions from cross-cultural and epistemological perspectives. As researchers in music and the social sciences with experience building and sustaining such networks, we participated in a vi...

The lack of standardized cross-cultural databases has impeded scientific understanding of the role of the performing arts in other domains of human society. This paper introduces the Global Jukebox (theglobaljukebox.org) as a resource for comparative and cross-cultural study of the performing arts and culture. Its core is the Cantometrics dataset,...

Carrying capacity, population pressure, and agricultural productivity are of central importance to understanding key innovations in human social and cultural evolution. In this paper we outline how crop yield models can be combined with the historical and archaeological information about past societies compiled by Seshat: Global History Database to...

Cultural phylogenies, or "trees" of culture, are typically built using methods from biology that use similarities and differences in artifacts to infer the historical relationships between the populations that produced them. While these methods have yielded important insights, particularly in linguistics, researchers continue to debate the extent t...

In this article I apply methods for measuring the cultural evolution of music to four diverse case studies for which the history of musical evolution has already been qualitatively documented: 1) the divergence of the Scottish 17th c. Lady Cassiles Lilt into nearly unrecognizable 20th c. American descendants, 2) the merging of work songs from dista...

Culture, like genes, evolves, but the existence of cross-culturally universal mechanisms of cultural evolution is debated. As a diverse but cross-culturally universal phenomenon, music may provide a novel domain to test for the existence of such mechanisms. Folk song melodies are culturally transmitted sequences of notes that change over time, and...

Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these th...

Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these th...

Scientists studying music and evolution often discuss similarities and differences between music, language, and bird song, but few studies have simultaneously compared these three domains quantitatively. To enable such com-parison, here we demonstrate several methods of cross-cultural/cross-species comparison of pitch structures in audio recordings...

While music information retrieval (MIR) has made substantial progress in automatic analysis of audio similarity for Western music, it remains unclear whether these algorithms can be meaningfully applied to cross-cultural analyses of more diverse samples. Here we collected perceptual ratings from 62 participants using a global sample of 30 tradition...

Music copyright lawsuits often result in multimillion dollar settlements, yet there are few objective guidelines for applying copyright law in infringement claims involving musical works. Recent research has attempted to develop objective methods based on automated similarity algorithms, but there remains almost no data on the role of perceived sim...

We propose a return to the forgotten agenda of comparative musicology, one that is updated with the paradigms of modern evolutionary theory and scientific methodology. Ever since the field of comparative musicology became redefined as ethnomusicology in the mid-20th century, its original research agenda has been all but abandoned by musicologists,...

Classification of organisms and languages has long provided the foundation for studying biological and cultural history, but there is still no accepted scheme for classifying songs cross-culturally. The best candidate, Lomax and Grauer’s “Cantometrics” coding scheme, did not spawn a large following due, in part, to concerns about its reliability. W...

Previous research suggests that synchronization is a key mechanism facilitating interpersonal cooperation, and rhythmic synchronization to a regular beat is a key feature distinguishing music from language. However, whether synchronization to a regular musical beat enhances cooperation relative to a linguistic control without a regular beat remains...

Many foundational questions in the psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has been conducted with Western participants and Western music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as strategie...

The causes, consequences, and timing of the rise of moralizing religions in world history have been the focus of intense debate. Progress has been limited by the availability of quantitative data to test competing theories, by divergent ideas regarding both predictor and outcomes variables, and by differences of opinion over methodology. To address...

In this issue, Slingerland et al. criticize the quality of the data from Seshat: Global History Databank utilized in our Nature paper entitled “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods throughout World History”. Their critique centres around the roles played by research assistants and experts in procuring and curating data, periodization structure...

Seshat: Global History Databank, established in 2011, was initiated by an ever-growing team of social scientists and humanities scholars to test theories about the evolution of complex societies (Francois et al. 2016; Turchin et al. 2015). Seshat reflects both what is known about global history (within certain practical constraints, discussed below...

This article is a response to Slingerland et al. who criticize the quality of the data from Seshat: Global History Databank utilized in our Nature paper entitled “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods throughout World History”. Their critique centres around the roles played by research assistants and experts in procuring and curating data, peri...

This article introduces the Seshat: Global History Databank, its potential, and its methodology. Seshat is a databank containing vast amounts of quantitative data buttressed by qualitative nuance for a large sample of historical and archaeological polities. The sample is global in scope and covers the period from the Neolithic Revolution to the Ind...

Music throughout the world varies greatly, yet some musical features like scale structure display striking cross-cultural similarities. Are there musical laws or biological constraints that underlie this diversity? The “vocal mistuning” hypothesis proposes that cross-cultural regularities in musical scales arise from imprecision in vocal tuning, wh...

The structure of musical scales has been proposed to reflect universal bioacoustic principles based on simple integer ratios. However, some researchers who have studied tuning in small samples of non-Western cultures have argued that such ratios are instead specific to Western music. To address this debate, we algorithmically analyzed and cross-cul...

Musical universals generally refer to aspects of music that are common across humankind, as opposed to aspects that are culture-specific. The existence of musical universals has implications for diverse areas, such as evolution, aesthetics, and cross-cultural understanding, and has thus been a major focus of debate in ethnomusicology and related di...

The uniqueness of human music relative to speech and animal song has been extensively debated, but never directly measured. To address this, we applied an automated scale analysis algorithm to a sample of 86 recordings of human music, human speech, and bird songs from around the world. We found that human music throughout the world uniquely emphasi...

The origins of religion and of complex societies represent evolutionary puzzles1–8. The ‘moralizing gods’ hypothesis offers a solution to both puzzles by proposing that belief in morally concerned supernatural agents culturally evolved to facilitate cooperation among strangers in large-scale societies9–13. Although previous research has suggested a...

The concept of cultural evolution was fundamental to the foundation of academic musicology and the subfield of comparative musicology, but largely disappeared from discussion after World War II despite a recent resurgence of interest in cultural evolution in other fields. I draw on recent advances in the scientific understanding of cultural evoluti...

Culture evolves in ways that are analogous to, but distinct from, genetic evolution. Previous studies have demonstrated correlations between genetic and cultural diversity at small scales within language families, but few studies have empirically investigated parallels between genetic and cultural evolution across multiple language families using a...

The Harvard Beat Assessment Test (H-BAT) is a battery of tests to assess abilities to perceive, produce, and synchronize with a music beat, and the inter-individual differences (Fujii & Schlaug, 2013). However, the original version of H-BAT requires particular hardware setups and is difficult to distribute. Here we developed an iOS application of H...

The structure of musical scales has been proposed to reflect universal acoustic principles based on simple integer ratios. However, some studying tuning in small samples of non-Western cultures have argued that such ratios are not universal but specific to Western music. To address this debate, we applied an algorithm that could automatically analy...

Although MIR has demonstrated great success in automatic analysis of Western music, no study has tested automatic algorithms against perceptual ground-truth data for a global musical sample. It thus remains unknown whether MIR algorithms can be meaningfully applied to automatically compare diverse music from around the world. In this pilot study, w...

Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics Project was arguably both the most ambitious and the most controversial undertaking in music and science that the world has known. Its flagship component, Lomax’s “cantometric” analysis of approximately 1,800 songs from 148 worldwide populations using 36 classificatory features, sparked extensive debate. While Lomax respon...

Unfounded music copyright lawsuits inhibit musical creativity and waste millions of taxpayer dollars annually. Our aim was to develop and test simple quantitative methods in order to supplement traditional qualitative musicological analyses and improve the efficiency and transparency of music copyright lawsuits. We adapted automatic sequence alignm...

This commentary offers a review of Videira and Rosa's attempt to construct and validate an online corpus of fado transcriptions. While I support their application of music information retrieval (MIR) tools to diverse musical repertoires, I fear that a lack of clarity in their goals leads them to fall into the trap of finding "solutions in search of...

"We thank Tosh et al. for their interest in our research but note that their analyses do not undermine the main findings of our article."

Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point toward modernity. The Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, but deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis...

The past few decades have seen a rapid increase in the availability and use of large music corpora. However, most music corpus studies remain limited to Western music, limiting our ability to understand the diversity and unity of human music throughout the world. I argue for the potential of cross-cultural corpus studies to contribute to comparativ...

Significance Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? To address these long-standing questions, we constructed a database of historical and archaeological information from 30 regions around the world over the last 10,000 years. Our an...

Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? To address these long-standing questions, we constructed a database of historical and archaeological information from 30 regions around the world over the last 10,000 years. Our analyses reveal...

McDermott et al. (Nature 535, 547–550; 2016) used a cross-cultural experiment to show that an isolated South American indigenous group, the Tsimane', exhibit indifference to musical dissonance. The study acts as an important counterweight to common beliefs that musical preferences reflect universal, mathematically based harmonic relationships that...

Musical universals generally refer to aspects of music that are common across humankind, as opposed to aspects that are culture-specific. The existence of musical universals has implications for diverse areas, such as evolution, aesthetics, and cross-cultural understanding, and has thus been a major focus of debate in ethnomusicology and related di...

Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point towards modernity. While the Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analys...

Darwin's theory of evolution provided striking explanatory power that has come to unify biology and has been successfully extended to various social sciences. In this dissertation, I attempt to show how cultural evolutionary theory may also hold promise for explaining diverse musical phenomena, using a series of quantitative case studies from a var...

ダーウィンの進化論はその高い説明力で生物学を統一することに成功し、社会科学にも応用されてきた。本論文では、文化的進化論のアプローチが様々な音楽的対象にも応用できる可能性を論じ、幾つかの異なる文化とジャンルを含む多様な計量的ケース・スタディーを通して、音楽的変化を制限する一般的な規則の存在を提示した。 第一章では、音楽と文化的進化の先行研究をまとめて説明した。この30年間での文化的進化においての科学的見解の進歩に基づき、根強い誤解に関して指摘した。特に、「進化」の定義には遺伝子も進歩も必要とされていないことを強調した。そして、 世界の民謡様式におけるマクロ進化的パターンから、細かい旋律の変化による大きな「曲族」 (tune family) が生まれるミクロ進化的メカニズムまで、既存の先行研究...