Sam Passmore’s research while affiliated with Australian National University and other places

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 historical structures analogous to linguistic and genetic diversity. After creating a matched dataset of musical, genetic, and linguistic data spanning 121 societies containing 981 songs, 1296 individual genetic profiles, and 121 languages, we show that global musical similarities are only weakly and inconsistently related to linguistic or genetic histories, with some regional exceptions such as within Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Our results suggest that global musical traditions are largely distinct from some non-musical aspects of human history.

Scales, sets of discrete pitches that form the basis of melodies, are thought to be one of the most universal hallmarks of music. But we know relatively little about cross-cultural diversity of scales or how they evolved. To remedy this, we assemble a cross-cultural database (Database of Musical Scales: DaMuSc) of scale data, collected over the past century by various ethnomusicologists. Statistical analyses of the data highlight that certain intervals (e.g., the octave, fifth, second) are used frequently across cultures. Despite some diversity among scales, it is the similarities across societies which are most striking: step intervals are restricted to 100-400 cents; most scales are found close to equidistant 5- and 7-note scales. We discuss potential mechanisms of variation and selection in the evolution of scales, and how the assembled data may be used to examine the root causes of convergent evolution.

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 as societies became larger and more differentiated, music became less participatory and more focused on solo singing. Here, we consider the prevalence of group singing and its relationship to social organization through the analysis of two global song corpora: 5776 coded audio recordings from 1024 societies, and 4709 coded ethnographic texts from 60 societies. In both corpora, we find that group singing is more common than solo singing, and that it is more likely in some social contexts (e.g. religious rituals, dance) than in others (e.g. healing, infant care). In contrast, relationships between group singing and social structure (community size or social differentiation) were not consistent within or between corpora. While we cannot exclude the possibility of sampling bias leading to systematic under-sampling of solo singing, our results from two large global corpora of different data types provide support for the interactive nature of music and its complex relationship with sociality.

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 as societies became larger and more differentiated, music became less participatory and more focused on solo singing. Here, we consider the prevalence of group singing and its relationship to social organization through the analysis of two global song corpora: 5,776 coded audio recordings from 1,024 societies, and 4,709 coded ethnographic texts from 60 societies. In both corpora, we find that group singing is more common than solo singing, and that it is more likely in some social contexts (e.g. religious rituals, dance) than in others (e.g. healing, infant care). In contrast, relationships between group singing and social structure (community size or social differentiation) were not consistent within or between corpora. While we cannot exclude the possibility of sampling bias leading to systematic under-sampling of solo singing, our results from two large global corpora of different data types provide support for the interactive nature of music and its complex relationship with sociality.

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.

Many recent proposals claim that languages adapt to their environments. The linguistic niche hypothesis claims that languages with numerous native speakers and substantial proportions of nonnative speakers (societies of strangers) tend to lose grammatical distinctions. In contrast, languages in small, isolated communities should maintain or expand their grammatical markers. Here, we test these claims using a global dataset of grammatical structures, Grambank. We model the impact of the number of native speakers, the proportion of nonnative speakers, the number of linguistic neighbors, and the status of a language on grammatical complexity while controlling for spatial and phylogenetic autocorrelation. We deconstruct "grammatical complexity" into two separate dimensions: how much morphology a language has ("fusion") and the amount of information obligatorily encoded in the grammar ("informativity"). We find several instances of weak positive associations but no inverse correlations between grammatical complexity and sociodemographic factors. Our findings cast doubt on the widespread claim that grammatical complexity is shaped by the sociolinguistic environment.

For a single species, human kinship organization is both remarkably diverse and strikingly organized. Kinship terminology is the structured vocabulary used to classify, refer to, and address relatives and family. Diversity in kinship terminology has been analyzed by anthropologists for over 150 years, although recurrent patterning across cultures remains incompletely explained. Despite the wealth of kinship data in the anthropological record, comparative studies of kinship terminology are hindered by data accessibility. Here we present Kinbank, a new database of 210,903 kinterms from a global sample of 1,229 spoken languages. Using open-access and transparent data provenance, Kinbank offers an extensible resource for kinship terminology, enabling researchers to explore the rich diversity of human family organization and to test longstanding hypotheses about the origins and drivers of recurrent patterns. We illustrate our contribution with two examples. We demonstrate strong gender bias in the phonological structure of parent terms across 1,022 languages, and we show that there is no evidence for a coevolutionary relationship between cross-cousin marriage and bifurcate-merging terminology in Bantu languages. Analysing kinship data is notoriously challenging; Kinbank aims to eliminate data accessibility issues from that challenge and provide a platform to build an interdisciplinary understanding of kinship.

While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here, we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on the structural diversity of the world's languages, evaluate constraints on linguistic diversity, and identify the world's most unusual languages. An analysis of the consequences of language loss reveals that the reduction in diversity will be strikingly uneven across the major linguistic regions of the world. Without sustained efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages, our linguistic window into human history, cognition, and culture will be seriously fragmented.

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 musical diversity and show that musical traits contain geographically constrained patterns of between-society diversity. We pair musical data to genetic and linguistic datasets spanning 121 societies containing 981 songs, 1,296 individual genetic profiles, and 121 languages, showing that musical traditions contain similar, albeit weaker, patterns of spatial decay to linguistic diversity and genetic diffusion. However, the structure of musical similarity is different to linguistic or genetic histories. Musical relationships correlate with genetic and linguistic relationships within some regions, but not globally. Our results suggest that global musical traditions are distinct from non-musical aspects of human history.

Many recent proposals claim that languages adapt to their environments. The Linguistic Niche hypothesis claims that languages with numerous native speakers and substantial proportions of non-native speakers (societies of strangers) will tend to lose grammatical distinctions. In contrast, languages in small, isolated communities should maintain or expand their range of grammatical markers. Here, we test such claims using a new global dataset of grammatical structures - Grambank. We model the impact of the number of native speakers, the proportion of non-native speakers, the number of linguistic neighbors, and the status of a language on grammatical complexity while controlling for spatial and phylogenetic autocorrelation. We deconstruct "grammatical complexity" into two separate dimensions: (i) how much morphology a language has ("fusion"), and (ii) the amount of information obligatorily encoded in the grammar ("informativity"). We find several instances of weak positive associations but no inverse correlations between grammatical complexity and sociodemographic factors. Our findings cast doubt on the widespread assumption that grammatical complexity is shaped by the sociolinguistic environment.