ORCID Profile
0000-0001-6996-7496
Current Organisations
University of Oxford
,
The University of Auckland
,
Keio University Shonan Fujisawa
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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: Center for Open Science
Date: 08-09-2019
Abstract: As we noted prominently, our initially uploaded preprint was a "non-peer-reviewed draft subject to revision". We have now recognized and corrected an important error in our data and code (details at esavage/moralizing-gods) leading us to withdraw this version of the manuscript. Correcting this error does not change any of the conclusions of our original article1. A correction notice and an updated version of this manuscript2 have been submitted for peer review and will be posted publicly once they have completed peer review.Please do not cite, use or distribute the previous version further. We apologize for any confusion caused.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 03-2022
DOI: 10.1016/J.CUB.2022.01.039
Abstract: Culture evolves,
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: Elsevier BV
Date: 09-2022
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: 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: 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: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Date: 21-12-2017
Abstract: Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? To address these long-standing questions, we constructed a database of historical and archaeological information from 30 regions around the world over the last 10,000 years. Our analyses revealed that characteristics, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems, show strong evolutionary relationships with each other and that complexity of a society across different world regions can be meaningfully measured using a single principal component of variation. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history.
Publisher: The Royal Society
Date: 09-2023
DOI: 10.1098/RSOS.230562
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: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Date: 14-06-2018
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 30-11-2022
Abstract: What, if any, similarities and differences between music and speech are consistent across cultures? Both music and language are found in all known human societies and are argued to share evolutionary roots and cognitive resources, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music across languages on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we analyze a novel dataset of 300 high-quality annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of singing, recitation, conversational speech, and instrumental music from our 75 coauthors whose 55 1st/heritage languages span 21 language families to find strong evidence for cross-culturally consistent differences and similarities between music and language. Of our six pre-registered predictions, five were strongly supported: relative to speech, songs use 1) higher pitch, 2) slower temporal rate, and 3) more stable pitches, while both songs and speech used similar 4) pitch interval size, and 5) timbral brightness. Our 6th prediction that song and speech would show similar pitch declination was inconclusive, with exploratory analysis suggesting that songs tend to follow an arched contour while speech contours tend to decline overall but end with a slight rise. Because our non-representative language s le and unusual design involving coauthors as participants could affect our results, we also performed robustness analyses - including a parallel reanalysis of a previously published dataset of 418 song/speech recordings from 209 in iduals whose 16 languages span 11 language families (Hilton & Moser et al., 2022, Nature Human Behaviour) - which confirmed that our conclusions are robust to these potential biases. Exploratory analyses identified additional features such as phrase length, intensity, and rhythmic/melodic regularity that also consistently distinguish song from speech, and suggest that such features also vary along a “musi-linguistic” continuum in a cross-culturally consistent manner when including instrumental melodies and recited lyrics. Further exploratory analysis suggests that pitch height is the only consistently sexually dimorphic feature (female singing/speaking is almost one octave higher than male on average), and that other factors such as musical training and recording context may also interact to influence the magnitude of song-speech differences. Our study provides strong empirical evidence for the existence of cross-cultural regularities in music and speech.
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.
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Start Date: 2023
End Date: 2026
Funder: Marsden Fund
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