A phylogenetic analysis of Orlando Gibbons's Prelude in G

Windram, Heather F.; Charlston, T.; Howe, Christopher J.

doi:10.1093/em/cau100

Cited by 13 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Such cases can be ideal for phylogenetic analysis when variation is thought to re ect cultural transmission. The 16 di erent versions of Orlando Gibbon's "Prelude in G", for example, have slight variations like doubled and dotted notes that were introduced and spread during serial transcription (Windram et al, 2014). Similarly, di erent performances of Bach's sonatas for violin have variation in characteristics like chord ratios, vibrato, and tempo changes that appear to be clustered into recording periods (Liebman et al, 2012).…”

Section: Classical Musicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural evolution and music

Youngblood¹,

Ozaki²,

Savage³

2021

Preprint

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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 patterns, 2) experimental approaches that explore cultural transmission and transformation, and 3) research on “music-like” behaviors in non-human species, such as bird and whale song, that highlights shared mechanisms and future directions. Finally, we discuss applications of this research to issues like copyright enforcement and algorithmic inequality. Given the diversity of musical datasets that have yet to be fully leveraged, we think that music has the potential to become a powerful research model for cultural evolution.

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Section: Classical Musicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural evolution and music

Youngblood¹,

Ozaki²,

Savage³

2021

Preprint

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“…Recently, scientists have attempted to apply microevolutionary methods to a variety of Western and non-Western genres in the form of sequence alignment techniques adapted from molecular biology (Mongeau and Sankoff, 1990;van Kranenburg et al 2009;Toussaint, 2013;Windram et al, 2014;Savage and Atkinson, 2015). Such techniques make it possible to automate things like quantifying melodic similarities and identifying boundaries between tune families (Savage and Atkinson 2015; Jan, 2018), making analysis possible on vast scales that would be impossible to perform manually.…”

Section: Microevolution and Tune Family Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural evolution of music

Savage

2019

Palgrave Commun

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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 evolution to clarify persistent misconceptions about the roles of genes and progress in musical evolution, and review literature relevant to musical evolution ranging from macroevolution of global songstyle to microevolution of tune families. I also address criticisms regarding issues of musical agency, meaning, and reductionism, and highlight potential applications including music education and copyright. While cultural evolution will never explain all aspects of music, it offers a useful theoretical framework for understanding diversity and change in the world's music.

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“…While modernist composers in the 20 th century believed that the only constraint on musical evolution was a lack of imagination to move outside the realms of established tradition (62), our analysis suggests instead specific mechanisms that limit some boundaries of musical creativity. Such mechanisms are relevant not only for understanding the evolution of traditional folk songs but also for art music (36) and popular music (25,63) around the world, with applications to areas such as music copyright law and cover song detection (11,46,64,65). Overall, our findings suggest that even human artistic creativity can be understood as an evolutionary process that demonstrates cross-cultural regularities.…”

Section: Figure 3 Differences In Tonal Systems For Highly Related Pamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Inspired by such analogies, here we use a novel method to quantitatively test for the presence of general mechanisms of musical evolution by adapting automated sequence alignment algorithms originally developed by molecular geneticists and later applied to language, music, and other domains of culture (33)(34)(35)(36)(37). We use this method to quantify rates of evolution for three specific mechanisms we predicted would constrain musical evolution based on applying evolutionary theory to music cognition (38,39).…”

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confidence: 99%

Sequence alignment of folk song melodies reveals cross-cultural regularities of musical evolution

Savage¹,

Chiba²,

Te³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Melodies are culturally transmitted sequences of notes that evolve through time in a manner that broadly parallels the process of molecular sequence evolution. While gene sequencing and the identification of general mechanisms of DNA transmission and mutation have revolutionized our understanding of biological evolution, the nature - and even the existence - of cross-culturally universal mechanisms of musical evolution remains debated. Here we adapt sequence alignment algorithms from molecular genetics to analyze musical evolution in a sample of 10,062 melodies from musically divergent Japanese and English folk song traditions. Our analysis identifies 328 pairs of highly related melodies, within which rates of musical evolution vary in ways predicted by general principles of music cognition and cultural evolution. Note changes are more likely when they have smaller impacts on a song's melody, specifically: 1) notes are most likely to change to neighboring notes, 2) rarer notes are more likely to change, and 3) notes with stronger functional roles are less likely to change. These results are consistent across samples despite using different scales with different probabilities of change between notes, suggesting they may apply universally. Our findings demonstrate that even a creative art form such as music is subject to evolutionary constraints analogous to those governing the evolution of genes, languages, and other domains of culture.

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A phylogenetic analysis of Orlando Gibbons's Prelude in G

Cited by 13 publications

References 13 publications

Cultural evolution and music

Cultural evolution and music

Cultural evolution of music

Sequence alignment of folk song melodies reveals cross-cultural regularities of musical evolution

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