Papers - Savage, Patrick

Automatic acoustic analyses quantify variation in pitch structure within and between human music, speech, and bird song

S Sato, J Mcbride, P Pfordresher, A Tierney, J Six, S Fujii, PE Savage

PsyArXiv  2020

Combining historical and archaeological data with crop models to estimate agricultural productivity in past societies

C Collins, O Oyebamiji, NR Edwards, PP Holden, A Williams, G Jordan, ...

SocArXiv  2020

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

PE Savage, G Chiba, TE Currie, H Suzuki, Q Atkinson

PsyArXiv  2020

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

M Youngblood, K Baraghith, PE Savage

arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.02460  2020

Measuring the cultural evolution of music: Cross-cultural and cross-genre case studies

PE Savage

PsyArXiv  2020

Exploring correlations in genetic and cultural variation across language families in Northeast Asia

H Matsumae, P Ranacher, PE Savage, DE Blasi, TE Currie, ...

bioRxiv, 513929 (Science Advances)  7 ( 34 )  2020

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Culture evolves in ways that are analogous to, but distinct from, genomes. Previous studies examined similarities between cultural variation and genetic variation (population history) at small scales within language families, but few studies have empirically investigated these parallels across language families using diverse cultural data. We report an analysis comparing culture and genomes from in and around northeast Asia spanning 11 language families. We extract and summarize the variation in language (grammar, phonology, lexicon), music (song structure, performance style), and genomes (genome-wide SNPs) and test for correlations. We find that grammatical structure correlates with population history (genetic history). Recent contact and shared descent fail to explain the signal, suggesting relationships that arose before the formation of current families. Our results suggest that grammar might be a cultural indicator of population history while also demonstrating differences among cultural and genetic relationships that highlight the complex nature of human history.

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Musical diversity in India: A preliminary computational study using Cantometrics

H Daikoku, ALC Wood, PE Savage

Keio SFC Journal 20 (2), 34-61  2020

Automatic comparison of human music, speech, and bird song suggests uniqueness of human scales

Jiei Kuroyanagi, Shoichiro Sato, Meng-Jou Ho, Gakuto Chiba, Joren Six, Peter Pfordresher, Adam Tierney, Shinya Fujii, Patrick E. Savage

Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis (FMA2019)  2019.07

Research paper (international conference proceedings), Joint Work, Accepted

Automatic comparison of global children’s and adult songs supports a sensorimotor hypothesis for the origin of musical scales

Shoichiro Sato, Joren Six, Peter Pfordresher, Shinya Fujii, Patrick E. Savage

Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis (FMA2019)  2019.07

Research paper (international conference proceedings), Joint Work, Accepted

Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

Whitehouse, H.*, François, P.*, SAVAGE E Patrick*, Currie, T. E., Feeney, K. C., Cioni, E., Purcell, R., Ross, R. M., Larson, J., Baines, J., ter Haar, B., Covey, A., Turchin, P.

Nature (Nature)  568 ( 7751 ) 226 - 229 2019.04

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted,  ISSN  00280836

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© 2019, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. The origins of religion and of complex societies represent evolutionary puzzles1–8. The ‘moralizing gods’ hypothesis offers a solution to both puzzles by proposing that belief in morally concerned supernatural agents culturally evolved to facilitate cooperation among strangers in large-scale societies9–13. Although previous research has suggested an association between the presence of moralizing gods and social complexity3,6,7,9–18, the relationship between the two is disputed9–13,19–24, and attempts to establish causality have been hampered by limitations in the availability of detailed global longitudinal data. To overcome these limitations, here we systematically coded records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality. Our analyses not only confirm the association between moralizing gods and social complexity, but also reveal that moralizing gods follow—rather than precede—large increases in social complexity. Contrary to previous predictions9,12,16,18, powerful moralizing ‘big gods’ and prosocial supernatural punishment tend to appear only after the emergence of ‘megasocieties’ with populations of more than around one million people. Moralizing gods are not a prerequisite for the evolution of social complexity, but they may help to sustain and expand complex multi-ethnic empires after they have become established. By contrast, rituals that facilitate the standardization of religious traditions across large populations25,26 generally precede the appearance of moralizing gods. This suggests that ritual practices were more important than the particular content of religious belief to the initial rise of social complexity.

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Cultural evolution of music

SAVAGE E Patrick

Palgrave Communications (Palgrave Communications)  5 ( 1 ) 1 - 12 2019.02

Research paper (scientific journal), Single Work, Accepted

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© 2019, The Author(s). 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 song-style 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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Universals

PE Savage

The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, 2282–2285  2019

Reply to Beheim et al.: Reanalyses confirm robustness of original analyses

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

SocArXiv  2019

Exploring deep-time relationships between cultural and genetic evolution in Northeast Asia

H Matsumae, PE Savage, P Ranacher, DE Blasi, TE Currie, T Sato, ...

bioRxiv, 513929  2019

Explaining the Rise of Moralizing Religions: A test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat Databank

P Turchin, H Whitehouse, P François, D Hoyer, S Nugent, J Larson, ...

SocArXiv  2019

An introduction to Seshat: Global History Databank

P Turchin, H Whitehouse, P François, D Hoyer, A Alves, J Baines, D Baker, ...

SocArXiv  2019

A new era in the study of global history is born but it needs to be nurtured

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

Journal of Cognitive Historiography  2019

Small-integer ratios predominate throughout the world's musical scales

G Chiba, MJ Ho, S Sato, J Kuroyanagi, J Six, P Pfordresher, A Tierney, ...

PsyArXiv  2019

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

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

Nature 568 (7751), 226-229  2019

Quantitative evaluation of music copyright infringement

Savage, Patrick E., CRONIN Charles, MÜLLENSIEFEN Daniel, ATKINSON Quentin D.

Proceedings of the Folk Music Analysis 2018 Workshop  2018.06

Research paper (international conference proceedings), Joint Work, Accepted

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Unfounded music copyright lawsuits inhibit musical creativity and waste millions of taxpayer dollars annually. Our aim was to develop and test simple quantitative methods in order to supplement traditional qualitative musicological analyses and improve the efficiency and transparency of music copyright lawsuits. We adapted automatic sequence alignment algorithms from computational biology to create a "percent melodic identity" (PMI) method that was initially developed to measure the cultural evolution of folk music from different cultures. This method automatically quantifies and visualizes the percentage of identical pitch classes shared between two melodic sequences. We applied the PMI method to a corpus of 20 pairs of melodies that had been the subject of legal decisions and that had previously been analyzed using automatic methods. We found that the PMI method was able to accurately predict 80% (16/20) of previous decisions, with PMIs below 50% usually resulting in decisions of no infringement (11/13 cases), and PMIs above 50% usually resulting in decisions of infringement (5/7 cases). Importantly, each of the four outlying cases could be explained by contextual factors not related to melodic similarity (e.g., lyrics, access). Our results provide promise for improving music copyright evaluation by supplementing traditional qualitative components with quantitative methods and visualization tools that are simple enough to be useful to juries, judges, and other non-musicologists.