Papers - Savage, Patrick

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

PE Savage, S Passmore, G Chiba, TE Currie, H Suzuki, QD Atkinson

Current Biology 32 (6), 1395-1402. e8 (Current Biology)  32 ( 6 ) 1395 - 1402.e8 2022.03

ISSN  09609822

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Culture evolves,1–5 but the existence of cross-culturally general regularities of cultural evolution is debated.6–8 As a diverse but universal cultural phenomenon, music provides a novel domain to test for the existence of such regularities.9–12 Folk song melodies can be thought of as culturally transmitted sequences of notes that change over time under the influence of cognitive and acoustic/physical constraints.9–15 Modeling melodies as evolving sequences constructed from an “alphabet” of 12 scale degrees16 allows us to quantitatively test for the presence of cross-cultural regularities using a sample of 10,062 melodies from musically divergent Japanese and English (British/American) folk song traditions.17,18 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 samples 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.

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Global relationships between musical, linguistic, and genetic diversity

S Passmore, ALC Wood, C Barbieri, D Shilton, H Daikoku, Q Atkinson, ...

PsyArXiv. March 11  2022

Phylogenetic reconstruction of the cultural evolution of electronic music via dynamic community detection (1975–1999)

M Youngblood, K Baraghith, PE Savage

Evolution and Human Behavior 42 (6), 573-582 (Evolution and Human Behavior)  42 ( 6 ) 573 - 582 2021.11

ISSN  10905138

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Phylogenetic trees or networks representing cultural evolution are typically built using methods from biology that use similarities and differences in cultural traits to infer the historical relationships between the populations that produced them. While these methods have yielded important insights, researchers continue to debate the extent to which cultural phylogenies are tree-like or reticulated due to high levels of horizontal transmission. In this study, we propose a novel method for phylogenetic reconstruction using dynamic community detection that focuses not on the cultural traits themselves (e.g., musical features), but the people creating them (musicians). We used data from 1,498,483 collaborative relationships between electronic music artists to construct a cultural phylogeny based on observed population structure. The results suggest that, although vertical transmission appears to be dominant, the potential for horizontal transmission (indexed by between-population linkage) is relatively high and populations never become fully isolated from one another. In addition, we found evidence that electronic music diversity has increased between 1975 and 1999. The method used in this study is available as a new R package called DynCommPhylo. Future studies should apply this method to other cultural systems such as academic publishing and film, as well as biological systems where high resolution reproductive data is available, and develop formal inferential models to assess how levels of reticulation in evolution vary across domains.

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Toward inclusive theories of the evolution of musicality

PE Savage, P Loui, B Tarr, A Schachner, L Glowacki, S Mithen, WT Fitch

Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44 (Behavioral and Brain Sciences)  44   132 - 140 2021.09

ISSN  0140525X

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We compare and contrast the 60 commentaries by 109 authors on the pair of target articles by Mehr et al. and ourselves. The commentators largely reject Mehr et al.'s fundamental definition of music and their attempts to refute (1) our social bonding hypothesis, (2) byproduct hypotheses, and (3) sexual selection hypotheses for the evolution of musicality. Instead, the commentators generally support our more inclusive proposal that social bonding and credible signaling mechanisms complement one another in explaining cooperation within and competition between groups in a coevolutionary framework (albeit with some confusion regarding terminologies such as byproduct and exaptation). We discuss the proposed criticisms and extensions, with a focus on moving beyond adaptation/byproduct dichotomies and toward testing of cross-species, cross-cultural, and other empirical predictions.

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Music as a coevolved system for social bonding

PE Savage, P Loui, B Tarr, A Schachner, L Glowacki, S Mithen, WT Fitch

Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Behavioral and Brain Sciences)  44 2021

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted,  ISSN  0140525X

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Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archaeology, anthropology, biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience into a unified framework that accounts for the biological and cultural evolution of music. We argue that the evolution of musicality involves gene-culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors that initially arose and spread as cultural inventions had feedback effects on biological evolution due to their impact on social bonding. We emphasize the deep links between production, perception, prediction, and social reward arising from repetition, synchronization, and harmonization of rhythms and pitches, and summarize empirical evidence for these links at the levels of brain networks, physiological mechanisms, and behaviors across cultures and across species. Finally, we address potential criticisms and make testable predictions for future research, including neurobiological bases of musicality and relationships between human music, language, animal song, and other domains. The music and social bonding (MSB) hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music.

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The Global Jukebox: A public database of performing arts and culture

A Wood, KR Kirby, C Ember, S Silbert, H Daikoku, J Mcbride, S Passmore, ...

PsyArXiv  2021

Big Gods did not drive the rise of big societies throughout world history

H Whitehouse, P François, PE Savage, D Hoyer, KC Feeney, E Cioni, ...

OSF Preprints  2021

Universality and cross-cultural variation in mental representations of music revealed by global comparison of rhythm priors

N Jacoby, R Polak, J Grahn, D Cameron, KM Lee, R Godoy, ...

PsyArXiv  2021

Sight vs. sound in the judgment of music performance: Cross-cultural evidence from classical piano and Tsugaru shamisen competitions [Stage 1 Registered Report]

G Chiba, Y Ozaki, S Fujii, PE Savage

Peer Community In Registered Reports  2021

Sampling criteria and recording quality influence relaxation responses to lullabies

PE Savage, Y Ozaki, SE Trehub

PsyArXiv  2021

Retraction Note: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

H Whitehouse, P François, PE Savage, TE Currie, KC Feeney, E Cioni, ...

Nature 595 (7866), 320-320  2021

Reliability of automated and human transcriptions of non-Western music

Y Ozaki, J McBride, E Benetos, P Pfordresher, J Six, AT Tierney, ...

ICMPC-ESCOM 2021  2021

Building sustainable global collaborative networks: Recommendations from music studies and the social sciences

PE Savage, N Jacoby, E Margulis, H Daikoku, M Anglada-Tort, ...

PsyArXiv  2021

Are pitches discrete? An information-theoretic framework and a corpus study

J McBride, AT Tierney, P Pfordresher, J Six, S Fuji, PE Savage

ICMPC-ESCOM 2021  2021

Agreement among human and annotated transcriptions of global songs

Y Ozaki, J McBride, E Benetos, PQ Pfordresher, J Six, A T Tierney, ...

International Society for Music Information Retrieval  2021

Cultural evolution and music

M Youngblood, Y Ozaki, PE Savage

PsyArXiv  2021

Cross-cultural work in music cognition: Challenges, insights, and recommendations

N Jacoby, EH Margulis, M Clayton, E Hannon, H Honing, J Iversen, ...

Music Perception 37 (3), 185-195 (Music Perception)  37 ( 3 ) 185 - 195 2020.02

ISSN  07307829

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© 2020 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. MANY FOUNDATIONAL QUESTIONS IN THE psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has been conducted with Western participants and Western music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as strategies for overcoming differences in assumptions, methods, and terminology. This position paper surveys the current state of the field and offers a number of concrete recommendations focused on issues involving ethics, empirical methods, and definitions of "music" and "culture.".

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Rhythm, synchrony, and cooperation

PE Savage, M Yamauchi, M Hamaguchi, B Tarr, Y Kitayama, S Fujii

PsyArXiv  2020

Perceptual vs. automated judgments of music copyright infringement

Y Yuan, S Oishi, C Cronin, D Müllensiefen, Q Atkinson, S Fujii, PE Savage

Proceedings of the 21st International Society for Music Information …  2020

Human and automated judgements of musical similarity in a global sample

H Daikoku, S Ding, US Sanne, E Benetos, AL Wood, S Fujii, PE Savage

PsyArXiv  2020