ORCID Profile
0000-0002-5302-356X
Current Organisations
Australian National University
,
University of Bristol
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Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 09-10-2020
Abstract: Culture evolves, but the existence of cross-culturally general regularities of cultural evolution is debated. As a erse but universal cultural phenomenon, music provides a novel domain to test for the existence of such regularities. Folk song melodies can be thought of as culturally transmitted sequences of notes that change over time under the influence of cognitive and acoustic hysical constraints. Modeling melodies as evolving sequences constructed from an “alphabet” of 12 scale degrees allows us to quantitatively test for the presence of cross-cultural regularities using a s le of 10,062 melodies from musically ergent Japanese and English (British/American) folk song traditions. Our analysis identifies 328 pairs of highly related melodies, finding that note changes are more likely when they have smaller impacts on a song's melody. Specifically: 1) notes with stronger rhythmic functions are less likely to change, and 2) note substitutions are most likely between neighboring notes. We also find that note insertions/deletions (“indels”) are more common than note substitutions, unlike genetic evolution where the reverse is true. Our results are consistent across English and Japanese s les despite major differences in their scales and tonal systems. These 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.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 04-06-2019
DOI: 10.1111/TOPS.12430
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 28-02-2023
Abstract: The extent to which kinship terminology varies between linguistic groups is a long-debated but unresolved social and linguistic puzzle. Contemporary research shows that a six-category typology is overly simplistic, but no alternatives have reached broad acceptance. This paper takes a data-driven solution to this problem. Using data from the release of Kinbank, a global database of 1,156 kinship terminology, I quantitatively review the global ersity of kinship terminology to derive a more granular typology of kinship terminology. In a two-part analysis, I show that kinship terminology structure is more erse than is often assumed across three metrics. Firstly, more than six types are needed to represent the global ersity of kinship terminology. Secondly, typological categories are not equally variable. Some categories may contain identically structured terminology. Others may contain languages that only share a single feature. Finally, different subsets of kin (e.g. cousins vs grandparents) show different levels of variability. In the second part of the analysis, I explore the global distribution of the new typological categories, identifying globally and locally recurring structures. My analysis demonstrates how data can carve this semantic domain at its joints to identify observed clusters of ersity.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 13-05-2021
Abstract: 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 detailed global database of the performing arts that enlarges our understanding of human cultural ersity. Initially prototyped by Alan Lomax in the 1980s, its core is the Cantometrics dataset, encompassing standardized codings on 37 aspects of musical style for 5,776 traditional songs from 1,026 societies. The Cantometrics dataset has been cleaned and checked for reliability and accuracy, and includes a full coding guide with audio training ex les (theglobaljukebox.org/?songsofearth). Also being released are seven additional datasets coding and describing instrumentation, conversation, popular music, vowel and consonant placement, breath management, social factors, and societies. For the first time, all digitized Global Jukebox data are being made available in open-access, downloadable format (heglobaljukebox), linked with streaming audio recordings (theglobaljukebox.org) to the maximum extent allowed while respecting copyright and the wishes of culture-bearers. The data are cross-indexed with the Database of Peoples, Languages, and Cultures (D-PLACE) to allow researchers to test hypotheses about worldwide coevolution of aesthetic patterns and traditions. As an ex le, we analyze the global relationship between song style and societal complexity, showing that they are robustly related, in contrast to previous critiques claiming that these proposed relationships were an artifact of autocorrelation (though causal mechanisms remain unresolved).
Publisher: Desalination Publications
Date: 2019
Publisher: The Royal Society
Date: 10-2019
DOI: 10.1098/RSOS.191385
Abstract: Languages do not replace their vocabularies at an even rate: words endure longer if they are used more frequently. This effect, which has parallels in evolutionary biology, has been demonstrated for the core vocabulary, a set of common, unrelated meanings. The extent to which it replicates in closed lexical classes remains to be seen, and may indicate how general this effect is in language change. Here, we use phylogenetic comparative methods to investigate the history of 10 kinship categories, a type of closed lexical class of content words, across 47 Indo-European languages. We find that their rate of replacement is correlated with their usage frequency, and this relationship is stronger than in the case of the core vocabulary, even though the envelope of variation is comparable across the two cases. We also find that the residual variation in the rate of replacement of kinship terms is related to genealogical distance of referent to kin. We argue that this relationship is the result of social changes and corresponding shifts in the entire semantic class of kinship terms, shifts typically not present in the core vocabulary. Thus, an understanding of the scope and limits of social change is needed to understand changes in kinship systems, and broader context is necessary to model cultural evolution in particular and the process of system change in general.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 07-06-2021
DOI: 10.1007/S13752-021-00379-6
Abstract: Across the world people in different societies structure their family relationships in many different ways. These relationships become encoded in their languages as kinship terminology, a word set that maps variably onto a vast genealogical grid of kinship categories, each of which could in principle vary independently. But the observed ersity of kinship terminology is considerably smaller than the enormous theoretical design space. For the past century anthropologists have captured this variation in typological schemes with only a small number of model system types. Whether those types exhibit the internal co-selection of parts implicit in their use is an outstanding question, as is the sufficiency of typologies in capturing variation as a whole. We interrogate the coherence of classic kinship typologies using modern statistical approaches and systematic data from a new database, Kinbank. We first survey the canonical types and their assumed patterns of internal and external co-selection, then present two data-driven approaches to assess internal coherence. Our first analysis reveals that across parents’ and ego’s (one’s own) generation, typology has limited predictive value: knowing the system in one generation does not reliably predict the other. Though we detect limited co-selection between generations, “disharmonic” systems are equally common. Second, we represent structural ersity with a novel multidimensional approach we term kinship space . This approach reveals, for ego’s generation, some broad patterning consistent with the canonical typology, but ersity (and mixed systems) is considerably higher than classical typologies suggest. Our results strongly challenge the descriptive adequacy of the set of canonical kinship types.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 04-12-2022
Abstract: While global patterns of human genetic ersity are increasingly well characterized, the ersity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2,400 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 ersity of the world's languages, evaluate constraints on linguistic ersity, and identify the world's most unusual languages. An analysis of the consequences of language loss reveals that the reduction in ersity 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.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 26-07-2021
Abstract: Scales, sets of discrete pitches used to generate melodies, are thought to be one of the most universal features of music. Despite this, we know relatively little about how cross-cultural ersity, or how scales have evolved. We remedy this, in part, we assemble a cross-cultural database of empirical scale data, collected over the past century by various ethnomusicologists. We provide statistical analyses to highlight that certain intervals (e.g., the octave) are used frequently across cultures. Despite some ersity among scales, it is the similarities across societies which are most striking. Most scales are found close to equidistant 5- and 7-note scales for 7-note scales this accounts for less than 1% of all possible scales. In addition to providing these data and statistical analyses, we review how they may be used to explore the causes for convergent evolution in scales.
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 02-11-2022
DOI: 10.1371/JOURNAL.PONE.0275469
Abstract: 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 detailed global database of the performing arts that enlarges our understanding of human cultural ersity. Initially prototyped by Alan Lomax in the 1980s, its core is the Cantometrics dataset, encompassing standardized codings on 37 aspects of musical style for 5,776 traditional songs from 1,026 societies. The Cantometrics dataset has been cleaned and checked for reliability and accuracy, and includes a full coding guide with audio training ex les ( theglobaljukebox.org/?songsofearth ). Also being released are seven additional datasets coding and describing instrumentation, conversation, popular music, vowel and consonant placement, breath management, social factors, and societies. For the first time, all digitized Global Jukebox data are being made available in open-access, downloadable format ( heglobaljukebox ), linked with streaming audio recordings (theglobaljukebox.org) to the maximum extent allowed while respecting copyright and the wishes of culture-bearers. The data are cross-indexed with the Database of Peoples, Languages, and Cultures (D-PLACE) to allow researchers to test hypotheses about worldwide coevolution of aesthetic patterns and traditions. As an ex le, we analyze the global relationship between song style and societal complexity, showing that they are robustly related, in contrast to previous critiques claiming that these proposed relationships were an artifact of autocorrelation (though causal mechanisms remain unresolved).
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 2020
DOI: 10.1017/EHS.2020.41
Publisher: Ubiquity Press, Ltd.
Date: 2023
DOI: 10.5334/JOC.312
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 21-03-2023
Abstract: Music is a universal, erse cultural trait shaped by cultural and biological evolution. The extent to which global musical ersity 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 ersity and show that musical traits contain geographically constrained patterns of between-society ersity. We pair musical data to genetic and linguistic datasets spanning 121 societies containing 981 songs, 1,296 in idual genetic profiles, and 121 languages, showing that musical traditions contain similar, albeit weaker, patterns of spatial decay to linguistic ersity 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.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 18-01-2023
Abstract: Global music ersity 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. By using a quantitative approach to identify musical outliers, and a qualitative discussion of the most unusual songs, we can tie together scientific, and humanities approaches to unite knowledge on musical ersity. 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 ersity, we present a qualitative discussion of some of the most unusual in idual 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, cultural isolation, or as a marker of inter-societal pressures. There is weak evidence that the unusualness of music is predicted by kinship organisation and cultural isolation, but these predictors are heavily outweighed by finding that unusual songs are best predicted by knowing the society they come from - evidence that quantitatively supports the existence of musical style.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2020
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 27-05-2016
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 03-2022
DOI: 10.1016/J.CUB.2022.01.039
Abstract: Culture evolves,
Publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Date: 21-04-2023
Abstract: While global patterns of human genetic ersity are increasingly well characterized, the ersity 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 ersity of the world’s languages, evaluate constraints on linguistic ersity, and identify the world’s most unusual languages. An analysis of the consequences of language loss reveals that the reduction in ersity 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.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 09-2022
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 28-01-2022
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 24-11-2022
Abstract: 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 s ling bias leading to systematic under-s ling 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.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 23-02-2023
Abstract: 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.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 11-03-2022
Abstract: Music and language are both universal but erse 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 primarily reflect more recent contact between neighboring societies and local micro-evolution independent of population migration. Previous direct comparisons of musical, genetic, and linguistic ersity were restricted to small regional s les that gave conflicting results. Here, we analyze global patterns of ersity from newly public global databases containing over 5,000 traditional songs with standardized “Cantometric” codings and genomic profiles from over 4,000 in iduals. We directly compare musical, linguistic, and genetic ersity for a subset of 152 matched societies (represented by 1,054 songs, genomic profiles of 1,719 in iduals, and 152 languages). For both genes and music, differences within groups are greater than those between groups, but musical differences between groups are approximately three times greater than genetic differences. Song style and basic vocabulary both show relatively weak relationships with each other and with genetic distance and geographic proximity, in contrast to the much stronger relationships found between genes and geography. Thus, to our surprise, our findings suggest that music and language are weak proxies for human migrations.
Publisher: BMJ
Date: 20-12-2018
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 24-05-2023
DOI: 10.1371/JOURNAL.PONE.0283218
Abstract: For a single species, human kinship organization is both remarkably erse 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 s le 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 ersity of human family organization and to test longstanding hypotheses about the origins and drivers of recurrent patterns. We illustrate our contribution with two ex les. 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.
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 25-04-2016
Publisher: The Royal Society
Date: 04-2018
DOI: 10.1098/RSOS.171411
Abstract: How historical connections, events and cultural proximity can influence human development is being increasingly recognized. One aspect of history that has only recently begun to be examined is deep cultural ancestry, i.e. the vertical relationships of descent between cultures, which can be represented by a phylogenetic tree of descent. Here, we test whether deep cultural ancestry predicts the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) for 44 Eurasian countries, using language ancestry as a proxy for cultural relatedness and controlling for three additional factors—geographical proximity, religion and former communism. While cultural ancestry alone predicts HDI and its subcomponents (income, health and education indices), when geographical proximity is included only income and health indices remain significant and the effect is small. When communism and religion variables are included, cultural ancestry is no longer a significant predictor communism significantly negatively predicts HDI, income and health indices, and Muslim percentage of the population significantly negatively predicts education index, although the latter result may not be robust. These findings indicate that geographical proximity and recent cultural history—especially communism—are more important than deep cultural factors in current human development and suggest the efficacy of modern policy initiatives is not tightly constrained by cultural ancestry.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 17-09-2021
Abstract: Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World explains how the West came to be psychologically and culturally WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic), and the economic and social effects this has had on the last two thousand years of human history. One of the many strengths of WEIRDest People in the World is that it synthesizes evidence from psychology, economics, anthropology, and history into an integrated, compelling, and coherent theoretical framework. In this book, kinship is positioned at the forefront of narratives about the evolution of human societies – something that has long been recognized within anthropology but often missing from grand history narratives (Diamond, 1999 Harari, 2014). This work is highly readable while still making clear, empirically testable causal hypotheses. A central hypothesis of Henrich (2020) is that the Western Christian Church’s Marriage and Family Program (MFP) caused changes in European kinship systems. Here we evaluate the evidence presented in support of this hypothesis by reviewing the available information on pre-MFP kinship systems in Europe and re-analyzing cross-national associations between MFP and kinship structures using phylogenetic comparative methods. We raise alternative hypotheses about the relationships between the Western Christian Church and kinship structures and suggest that further research is needed to arbitrate these hypotheses.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 04-2021
Publisher: The Royal Society
Date: 09-2023
DOI: 10.1098/RSOS.230562
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
No related grants have been discovered for Sam Passmore.