Cultural evolution and music

Abstract

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.

How have music emotions been described in Google books? Historical trends and corpus differences

“…During the above time period, many Chinese people were actively seeking out "positive" objects, which had a noticeable impact on the emotional descriptions of music in Simplified Chinese books. We believe that this phenomenon aligns with the broader perspective on cultural evolution in music (Savage, 2019;Youngblood et al, 2023). By exploring the relationship between musical characteristics and specific cultural environments, music can serve as an important research tool to understand how cultural features change over time and across different geographic locations.…”

“…As a remarkably long-lived phenomenon, language containing a large number of common words has been passed down through multiple generations for centuries (Lieberman et al, 2007;Pagel et al, 2007). In fact, music, much like language, can also serve as a valuable research model to comprehend the evolution of cultural traits across time and space, thereby enriching our comprehension of cultural variation and transformation (Savage, 2019;Youngblood et al, 2023). In addition, by analyzing humanity's written records, researchers have investigated the historical trends of personality description (Leising et al, 2014;Roivainen, 2013;Ye et al, 2018), emotion expression (Acerbi et al, 2013), women's status (Twenge et al, 2012), cultural values (Greenfield, 2013;Zeng and Greenfield, 2015), morality (Kesebir and Kesebir, 2012), and so forth.…”

First-mover advantage in music

“…Recently, there has been growing interest in empirically studying the general mechanisms of musical change (Mehr et al, 2019;Ravignani et al, 2016;Youngblood et al, 2021) and, more broadly, artistic change (Fraiberger et al, 2018;Granito et al, 2019;Sobchuk, 2018). These mechanisms tend to fall into two broad categories.…”

Neural basis of melodic learning explains cross-cultural regularities in musical scales

“…Music—like language—is produced in all known human cultures [1; 2; 3] and displays varying structural norms across cultures [4; 5; 6; 7] as well as some structural stability [8; 9; 10]. The balance between diversity and stability in cross-cultural musical structure may be governed by general principles of cultural evolution [11; 12; 13], although there is still limited empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis [14; 15]. Yet, gaining insight into the way universal structures are selected may shed considerable light on the underlying cognitive processes [16; 15; 17; 14].…”