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Ecological and psychological factors in the cultural evolution of music
Abstract
The two target articles agree that processes of cultural evolution generate richness and diversity in music, but neither address this question in a focused way. We sketch one way to proceed – and hence suggest how the target articles differ not only in empirical claims, but also in their tacit, prior assumptions about the relationship between cognition and culture.
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. Using a quantitative approach to identify musical outliers and a qualitative discussion of the most unusual songs, we can combine scientific and humanities approaches to unite knowledge on musical diversity. Objectively defining unusual music is a delicate task, having historically been subject to Eurocentric approaches. Using the Global Jukebox, a dataset containing almost 6,000 songs from over 1,000 societies coded on 37 "Cantometric" variables of musical style, we designate the unusualness of a song as the frequency of its coded variables relative to their regional frequency. Using quantitative metrics to identify outliers in musical diversity, we present a qualitative discussion of some of the most unusual individual songs (from a Panpipe ensemble from Kursk, Russia), and a comparison of unusual repertoires from Malay, Kel Aïr, and Moroccan Berber musical cultures. We also ask whether unusual music is the result of unusual social organisation or isolation from other groups. There is weak evidence that the unusualness of music is predicted by kinship organisation and cultural isolation, but these predictors are heavily outweighed by the finding that unusual songs are best predicted by knowing the society they come from - evidence that quantitatively supports the existence of musical style.
Music is both universal, appearing in every known human culture, and culture-specific, often defying intelligibility across cultural boundaries. This duality has been the source of debate within the broad community of music researchers, and there have been significant disagreements both on the ontology of music as an object of study and the appropriate epistemology for that study. To help resolve this tension, I present a culture-cognition-mediator model that situates music as a mediator in the mutually constitutive cycle of cultures and selves representing the ways individuals both shape and are shaped by their cultural environments. This model draws on concepts of musical grammars and schema, contemporary theories in developmental and cultural psychology that blur the distinction between nature and nurture, and recent advances in cognitive neuroscience. Existing evidence of both directions of causality is presented, providing empirical support for the conceptual model. The epistemological consequences of this model are discussed, specifically with respect to transdisciplinarity, hybrid research methods, and several potential empirical applications and testable predictions as well as its import for broader ontological conversations around the evolutionary origins of music itself.
While widely acknowledged in the cultural evolution literature, ecological factors—aspects of the physical environment that affect the way in which cultural productions evolve—have not been investigated experimentally. Here, we present an experimental investigation of this type of factor by using a transmission chain (iterated learning) experiment. We predicted that differences in the distance between identical tools (drums) and in the order in which they are to be used would cause the evolution of different rhythms. The evidence confirms our predictions and thus provides a proof of concept that ecological factors—here a motor constraint—can influence cultural productions and that their effects can be experimentally isolated and measured. One noteworthy finding is that ecological factors can on their own lead to more complex rhythms.
Significance
Amati and Stradivari violins are highly appreciated by musicians and collectors, but the objective understanding of their acoustic qualities is still lacking. By applying speech analysis techniques, we found early Italian violins to emulate the vocal tract resonances of male singers, comparable to basses or baritones. Stradivari pushed these resonance peaks higher to resemble the shorter vocal tract lengths of tenors or altos. Stradivari violins also exhibit vowel qualities that correspond to lower tongue height and backness. These properties may explain the characteristic brilliance of Stradivari violins. The ideal for violin tone in the Baroque era was to imitate the human voice, and we found that Cremonese violins are capable of producing the formant features of human singers.
There has recently been renewed interest in using quantitative data to explore questions about musical universals. One explanation for certain musical universals is that they reflect ways of singing that are most energetically efficient, as opposed to biological specializations for human music. Previous research found support for this ‘‘motor constraint hypothesis’’ by comparing pitch contour shapes in samples of human and avian songs, but the sample of human songs was limited to notated scores of European and Chinese folk songs from the Essen database. Here we test this hypothesis using a more diverse global sample of human music recordings from the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. By directly comparing pitch contour shapes in a diverse sample of human songs and bird songs, we found that both human and bird songs tend to employ similar descending/arched melodic contours despite substantial differences in absolute pitch and duration. This preference was consistent for both Western and non-Western songs. Surprisingly, we also found that the global samples of human and bird song contours were significantly more correlated with one another than either was with the Essen contours. Our findings of broad cross-cultural and cross-species parallels support the motor constraint hypothesis for melodic contour. More generally, our findings demonstrate the importance of greater collaboration between ethnomusicology and music psychology.
Musicality can be defined as a natural, spontaneously developing trait based on and constrained by biology and cognition. Music, by contrast, can be defined as a social and cultural construct based on that very musicality. One critical challenge is to delineate the constituent elements of musicality. What biological and cognitive mechanisms are essential for perceiving, appreciating and making music? Progress in understanding the evolution of music cognition depends upon adequate characterization of the constituent mechanisms of musicality and the extent to which they are present in non-human species. We argue for the importance of identifying these mechanisms and delineating their functions and developmental course, as well as suggesting effective means of studying them in human and non-human animals. It is virtually impossible to underpin the evolutionary role of musicality as a whole, but a multicomponent perspective on musicality that emphasizes its constituent capacities, development and neural cognitive specificity is an excellent starting point for a research programme aimed at illuminating the origins and evolution of musical behaviour as an autonomous trait.
© 2015 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.
New things are often viewed as being better and more advanced than older counterparts; however, new does not denote superior. Music notation serves as one example of an innovation that is both lauded and derided. Early forms of music notation appear vague and ambiguous according to modern standards. But when combined with oral traditions, early music notation contained all the information required for a successful performance. Most facts pertaining to the notation of each period are clear, but multiple interpretations of early notation exist. The objective of this research is to critically analyze key periods of Western music notation to formulate a model for the evaluation of early notation. The research methodology consists of engaging primary and secondary sources from historical documents. These sources include scores, early musical treatises, and contemporary interpretations. The concluded model asserts that early music notation seems insufficient, imprecise, and indefinite when compared to contemporary forms, but early notation cannot be removed from the context it served and evaluated through the scope of modern requirements. From the origin of neumes in the ninth century to the rhythmic developments of the Ars Nova period in the fourteenth century, the evolution of music notation progressed as series of innovations that worked alongside oral traditions to meet the musical demands of each period.
Human song exhibits great structural diversity, yet certain aspects of melodic shape (how pitch is patterned over time) are widespread. These include a predominance of arch-shaped and descending melodic contours in musical phrases, a tendency for phrase-final notes to be relatively long, and a bias toward small pitch movements between adjacent notes in a melody [Huron D (2006) Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA)]. What is the origin of these features? We hypothesize that they stem from motor constraints on song production (i.e., the energetic efficiency of their underlying motor actions) rather than being innately specified. One prediction of this hypothesis is that any animals subject to similar motor constraints on song will exhibit similar melodic shapes, no matter how distantly related those animals are to humans. Conversely, animals who do not share similar motor constraints on song will not exhibit convergent melodic shapes. Birds provide an ideal case for testing these predictions, because their peripheral mechanisms of song production have both notable similarities and differences from human vocal mechanisms [Riede T, Goller F (2010) Brain Lang 115:69-80]. We use these similarities and differences to make specific predictions about shared and distinct features of human and avian song structure and find that these predictions are confirmed by empirical analysis of diverse human and avian song samples.
Music perception involves acoustic analysis, auditory memory, auditory scene analysis, processing of interval relations, of musical syntax and semantics, and activation of (pre)motor representations of actions. Moreover, music perception potentially elicits emotions, thus giving rise to the modulation of emotional effector systems such as the subjective feeling system, the autonomic nervous system, the hormonal, and the immune system. Building on a previous article (Koelsch and Siebel, 2005), this review presents an updated model of music perception and its neural correlates. The article describes processes involved in music perception, and reports EEG and fMRI studies that inform about the time course of these processes, as well as about where in the brain these processes might be located.
The existence and diversity of human cultures are made possible by our species-specific cognitive capacities. But how? Do cultures emerge and diverge as a result of the deployment, over generations and in different populations, of general abilities to learn, imitate and communicate? What role if any do domain-specific evolved cognitive abilities play in the emergence and evolution of cultures? These questions have been approached from different vantage points in different disciplines. Here we present a view that is currently developing out of the converging work of developmental psychologists, evolutionary psychologists and cognitive anthropologists.
Listening to music often evokes intense emotions [1, 2]. Recent research suggests that musical pleasure comes from positive reward prediction errors, which arise when what is heard proves to be better than expected [3]. Central to this view is the engagement of the nucleus accumbens-a brain region that processes reward expectations-to pleasurable music and surprising musical events [4-8]. However, expectancy violations along multiple musical dimensions (e.g., harmony and melody) have failed to implicate the nucleus accumbens [9-11], and it is unknown how music reward value is assigned [12]. Whether changes in musical expectancy elicit pleasure has thus remained elusive [11]. Here, we demonstrate that pleasure varies nonlinearly as a function of the listener's uncertainty when anticipating a musical event, and the surprise it evokes when it deviates from expectations. Taking Western tonal harmony as a model of musical syntax, we used a machine-learning model [13] to mathematically quantify the uncertainty and surprise of 80,000 chords in US Billboard pop songs. Behaviorally, we found that chords elicited high pleasure ratings when they deviated substantially from what the listener had expected (low uncertainty, high surprise) or, conversely, when they conformed to expectations in an uninformative context (high uncertainty, low surprise). Neurally, we found using fMRI that activity in the amygdala, hippocampus, and auditory cortex reflected this interaction, while the nucleus accumbens only reflected uncertainty. These findings challenge current neurocognitive models of music-evoked pleasure and highlight the synergistic interplay between prospective and retrospective states of expectation in the musical experience.
Cultural attraction theory (CAT) is a research agenda the purpose of which is to develop causal explanations of cultural phenomena. CAT is also an evolutionary approach to culture, in the sense that it treats culture as a population of items of different types, with the frequency of tokens of those types changing over time. Now more than 20 years old, CAT has made many positive contributions, theoretical and empirical, to the naturalization of the social sciences. In consequence of this growing impact, CAT has, in recent years, been the subject of critical discussion. Here, we review and respond to these critiques. In so doing, we also provide a clear and concise introduction to CAT. We give clear characterizations of CAT's key theoretical notions, and we outline how these notions are derived from consideration of the natural character of cultural phenomena (Box 1). This naturalistic quality distinguishes CAT from other evolutionary approaches to culture.
Humans use music for a variety of social functions: we sing to accompany dance, to soothe babies, to heal illness, to communicate love, and so on. Across animal taxa, vocalization forms are shaped by their functions, including in humans. Here, we show that vocal music exhibits recurrent, distinct, and cross-culturally robust form-function relations that are detectable by listeners across the globe. In Experiment 1, internet users (n = 750) in 60 countries listened to brief excerpts of songs, rating each song's function on six dimensions (e.g., "used to soothe a baby"). Excerpts were drawn from a geographically stratified pseudorandom sample of dance songs, lullabies, healing songs, and love songs recorded in 86 mostly small-scale societies, including hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and subsistence farmers. Experiment 1 and its analysis plan were pre-registered. Despite participants' unfamiliarity with the societies represented, the random sampling of each excerpt, their very short duration (14 s), and the enormous diversity of this music, the ratings demonstrated accurate and cross-culturally reliable inferences about song functions on the basis of song forms alone. In Experiment 2, internet users (n = 1,000) in the United States and India rated three contextual features (e.g., gender of singer) and seven musical features (e.g., melodic complexity) of each excerpt. The songs' contextual features were predictive of Experiment 1 function ratings, but musical features and the songs' actual functions explained unique variance in function ratings. These findings are consistent with the existence of universal links between form and function in vocal music.
Experience with spoken language starts prenatally, as hearing becomes operational during the second half of gestation. While maternal tissues filter out many aspects of speech, they readily transmit speech prosody and rhythm. These properties of the speech signal then play a central role in early language acquisition. In this study, we ask how the newborn brain uses variation in duration, pitch and intensity (the three acoustic cues that carry prosodic information in speech) to group sounds. In four near-infrared spectroscopy studies (NIRS), we demonstrate that perceptual biases governing how sound sequences are perceived and organized are present in newborns from monolingual and bilingual language backgrounds. Importantly, however, these prosodic biases are present only for acoustic patterns found in the prosody of their native languages. These findings advance our understanding of how prenatal language experience lays the foundations for language development.
Music has always played a central role in human culture. The question of how musical sounds can have such profound emotional and rewarding effects has been a topic of interest throughout generations. At a fundamental level, listening to music involves tracking a series of sound events over time. Because humans are experts in pattern recognition, temporal predictions are constantly generated, creating a sense of anticipation. We summarize how complex cognitive abilities and cortical processes integrate with fundamental subcortical reward and motivation systems in the brain to give rise to musical pleasure. This work builds on previous theoretical models that emphasize the role of prediction in music appreciation by integrating these ideas with recent neuroscientific evidence.
Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Over centuries and millennia, our ancestors worldwide found the most appropriate materials for increasingly complex acoustical applications. In the temperate climate of Europe, where the instruments of the Western symphony orchestra were developed and perfected, instrument makers still primarily take advantage of the unique property combination and the aesthetic appeal of wood. In all other continents, one material dominates and is frequently chosen for the manufacture of wind, string, and percussion instruments: the grass bamboo. Here, we review from a materials science perspective bamboo's and wood's unique and highly optimized structure and properties. Using material property charts plotting acoustic properties such as the speed of sound, the characteristic impedance, the sound radiation coefficient, and the loss coefficient against one another, we analyze and explain why bamboo and specific wood species are ideally suited for the manufacture of xylophone bars and chimes, flutes and organs, violins and...