Papers - Savage, Patrick

A Systematic Assessment of "Axial Age" Proposals Using Global Comparative Historical Evidence

Mullins, Daniel Austin, Hoyer, Daniel, Collins, Christina, Currie, Thomas, Feeney, Kevin, Francois, Pieter, Savage, Patrick E., Whitehouse, Harvey, Turchin, Peter

AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW (American Sociological Review)  83 ( 3 ) 596 - 626 2018.06

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted,  ISSN  0003-1224

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© 2018, © American Sociological Association 2018. Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point toward modernity. The Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, but deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the concept’s major global contentions. As a result, the Axial Age concept remains controversial. Seshat: Global History Databank provides new tools for examining this topic in social formations across Afro-Eurasia during the first two millennia BCE and first millennium CE, allowing scholars to empirically evaluate the varied and contrasting claims researchers have put forward. Results undercut the notion of a specific “age” of axiality limited to a specific geo-temporal localization. Critical traits offered as evidence of an axial transformation by proponents of the Axial Age concept appeared across Afro-Eurasia hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years prior to the proposed Axial Age. Our analysis raises important questions for future evaluations of this period and points the way toward empirically-led, historical-sociological investigations of the ideological and institutional foundations of complex societies.

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Identifying Style-Types in a Sample of Musical Improvisations Using Dimensional Reduction and Cluster Analysis

Ellis, Blair K., Hwang, Heungsun, Savage, Patrick E., Pan, Bing-Yi, Cohen, Annabel J., Brown, Steven

PSYCHOLOGY OF AESTHETICS CREATIVITY AND THE ARTS (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts)  12 ( 1 ) 110 - 122 2018.02

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted,  ISSN  1931-3896

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© 2016 American Psychological Association. Creativity research examines both the processes and products of creativity. An important avenue for analyzing creativity is by means of spontaneous improvisation, although there are major challenges to characterizing the products of improvisation because of their variable nature. A useful concept missing from the analysis of improvisation is the idea that the products of a corpus can be organized into a series of "style-types," where each type differs from others in certain key structural features. Clustering methods provide a reliable quantitative means of examining the organization of style-types within a diverse corpus of improvisations. To look at the utility of such methods, we examined a sample of 72 vocal melodic improvisations produced by novice improvisers. We first classified the melodies acoustically using a multidimensional musical-classification scheme, which coded the melodies for 19 distinct features of musical structure. We next employed multiple correspondence analysis (a dimensional reduction method) and k-means cluster analysis simultaneously, and obtained 3 relatively discrete clusters of improvisations. Stylistic analysis of these clusters revealed that they differed in key musical features related to phrase structure and rhythm. Cluster analyses provide a promising means of describing and analyzing the products of creativity, including variable structures like spontaneous improvisations.

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Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization

Turchin, Peter, Currie, Thomas E., Whitehouse, Harvey, Francois, Pieter, Feeney, Kevin, Mullins, Daniel, Hoyer, Daniel, Collins, Christina, Grohmann, Stephanie, Savage, Patrick E., Mendel-Gleason, Gavin, Turner, Edward, Dupeyron, Agathe, Cioni, Enrico, Reddish, Jenny, Levine, Jill, Jordan, Greine, Brandl, Eva, Williams, Alice, Cesaretti, Rudolf, Krueger, Marta, Ceccarelli, Alessandro, Figliulo-Rosswurm, Joe, Tuan, Po-Ju, Peregrine, Peter, Marciniak, Arkadiusz, Preiser-Kapeller, Johannes, Kradin, Nikolay, Korotayev, Andrey, Palmisano, Alessio, Baker, David, Bidmead, Julye, Bol, Peter, Christian, David, Cook, Connie, Covey, Alan, Feinman, Gary, Juliusson, Arni Daniel, Kristinsson, Axel, Miksic, John, Mostern, Ruth, Petrie, Cameron, Rudiak-Gould, Peter, ter Haar, Barend, Wallace, Vesna, Mair, Victor, Xie, Liye, Baines, John, Bridges, Elizabeth, Manning, Joseph, Lockhart, Bruce, Bogaard, Amy, Spencer, Charles

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 115 ( 2 ) E144 - E151 2018.01

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted,  ISSN  0027-8424

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Alan Lomax's Cantometrics Project: A comprehensive review

Patrick E. Savage

Music & Science (Music and Science)  1   1 - 19 2018

Research paper (scientific journal), Single Work, Accepted

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Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics Project was arguably both the most ambitious and the most controversial undertaking in music and science that the world has known. Its flagship component, Lomax’s “cantometric” analysis of approximately 1,800 songs from 148 worldwide populations using 36 classificatory features, sparked extensive debate. While Lomax responded to some criticisms, neither his final conclusions nor the evidence on which they were based were ever fully made clear. For decades, neither cantometrics nor Lomax’s related projects involving dance, speech, popular music, digital humanities, pedagogy, and activism were widely adopted by other researchers, but there has been a resurgence of interest since Lomax’s death in 2002. Here, I provide a comprehensive critical review of the Cantometrics Project, focusing on issues regarding the song sample, classification scheme, statistical analyses, interpretation, and ethnocentrism/reductionism. I identify misunderstandings, improvements that were made, and criticisms that remain to be addressed, and distil Lomax’s sometimes-conflicting claims into diagrams summarizing his three primary results: (1) ten regional song-style types, (2) nine musical factors representing intra-musical correlations, and (3) correlations between these musical factors and five factors of social structure. Although Lomax’s interpretations regarding correlations between song style and social structure appear weakly supported, his historical interpretations regarding connections ranging from colonial diaspora to ancient migrations provide a more promising starting point for both research and teaching about the global arts. While Lomax’s attempts to correlate features of social structure such as gender, religion, politics, and economics with stylistic features of musical performance largely failed to gain acceptance, the Cantometrics Project can still provide both inspiration and cautionary lessons for future exploration of relationships between music and culture.

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Human vs. automated judgements of cross-cultural musical similarity

H Daikoku, M Kinoshita, S Fujii, PE Savage

PsyArXiv  2018

Automatic analysis of global music recordings suggests scale tuning universals

MJ Ho, S Sato, J Kuroyanagi, J Six, S Brown, S Fujii, PE Savage

19th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference  2018

Automated comparison of children’s and adult songs supports the vocal mistuning theory of scale origins

S Sato, S Fujii, PE Savage

PsyArXiv  2018

An overview of cross-cultural music corpus studies

PE Savage

Oxford Handbook of Music and Corpus Studies  2018

" Solutions in Search of a Problem": Commentary on Videira and Rosa (2017)

PE Savage

Empirical Musicology Review 12 (3-4), 244-246  2018

GLOBAL MUSIC RECORDINGS SUPPORT THE MOTOR CONSTRAINT HYPOTHESIS FOR HUMAN AND AVIAN SONG CONTOUR

Savage, Patrick E., Tierney, Adam T., Patel, Aniruddh D.

MUSIC PERCEPTION 34 ( 3 ) 327 - 334 2017.02

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted,  ISSN  0730-7829

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How 'Circumpolar' is Ainu Music? Musical and Genetic Perspectives on the History of the Japanese Archipelago

Savage, Patrick E., Matsumae, Hiromi, Oota, Hiroki, Stoneking, Mark, Currie, Thomas E., Tajima, Atsushi, Gillan, Matt, Brown, Steven

ETHNOMUSICOLOGY FORUM 24 ( 3 ) 443 - 467 2015.12

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted,  ISSN  1741-1912

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Statistical universals reveal the structures and functions of human music

Savage, Patrick E., Brown, Steven, Sakai, Emi, Currie, Thomas E.

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 112 ( 29 ) 8987 - 8992 2015.07

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted,  ISSN  0027-8424

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Automatic tune family identification by musical sequence alignment

Patrick E. Savage, Quentin D. Atkinson

Proceedings of the 16th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2015)    162 - 168 2015

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

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Musics, like languages and genes, evolve through a process of transmission, variation, and selection. Evolution of musical tune families has been studied qualitatively for over a century, but quantitative analysis has been hampered by an inability to objectively distinguish between musical similarities that are due to chance and those that are due to descent from a common ancestor. Here we propose an automated method to identify tune families by adapting genetic sequence alignment algorithms designed for automatic identification and alignment of protein families. We tested the effectiveness of our method against a high-quality ground-truth dataset of 26 folk tunes from four diverse tune families (two English, two Japanese) that had previously been identified and aligned manually by expert musicologists. We tested different combinations of parameters related to sequence alignment and to modeling of pitch, rhythm, and text to find the combination that best matched the ground-truth classifications. The best-performing automated model correctly grouped 100% (26/26) of the tunes in terms of overall similarity to other tunes, identifying 85% (22/26) of these tunes as forming distinct tune families. The success of our approach on a diverse, cross-cultural ground-truth dataset suggests promise for future automated reconstruction of musical evolution on a wide scale.

Human genetic research, race, ethnicity and the labeling of populations: recommendations based on an interdisciplinary workshop in Japan

Takezawa, Yasuko, Kato, Kazuto, Oota, Hiroki, Caulfield, Timothy, Fujimoto, Akihiro, Honda, Shunwa, Kamatani, Naoyuki, Kawamura, Shoji, Kawashima, Kohei, Kimura, Ryosuke, Matsumae, Hiromi, Saito, Ayako, Savage, Patrick E., Seguchi, Noriko, Shimizu, Keiko, Terao, Satoshi, Yamaguchi-Kabata, Yumi, Yasukouchi, Akira, Yoneda, Minoru, Tokunaga, Katsushi

BMC MEDICAL ETHICS 15   8987 - 8992 2014.04

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted,  ISSN  1472-6939

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Correlations in the population structure of music, genes and language

Brown, Steven, Savage, Patrick E., Ko, Albert Min-Shan, Stoneking, Mark, Ko, Ying-Chin, Loo, Jun-Hun, Trejaut, Jean A.

PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES 281 ( 1774 ) 133 - 155 2014.01

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted,  ISSN  0962-8452

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Mapping Music: Cluster Analysis Of Song-Type Frequencies Within And Between Cultures

Savage, Patrick E., Brown, Steven

ETHNOMUSICOLOGY 58 ( 1 ) 133 - 155 2014.01

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted,  ISSN  0014-1836

Pour une nouvelle musicologie comparée: Cinq champs de recherche, cinq débats essentiels

Patrick E. Savage, Steven Brown

Anthropologie et Sociétés 38 ( 1 ) 193 - 216 2014

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted

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Comparative musicology has the potential to contribute greatly to our understanding of the evolution of culture. Comparative musicology flourished during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but declined after World War II due in part to its reliance on questionable models of progressive evolution. Its successor, ethnomusicology, generally avoided cross- cultural comparison and evolutionary theory. We propose a return to the forgotten agenda of comparative musicology, but one that is updated with modern scientific method and evolutionary theory. We outline five key areas and debates where comparative musicological data can contribute to an interdisciplinary understanding of the evolution of culture : 1) classification, 2) mechanisms of cultural evolution, 3) migration, 4) universals, and 5) biological evolution. We suggest that examining the coevolutionary relationships between musics, languages, and genes will provide a promising avenue for exploring these areas in future research.

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Toward a new comparative musicology

Patrick E. Savage, Steven Brown

Analytical Approaches to World Music 2 ( 2 ) 148 - 197 2013

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted

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We propose a return to the forgotten agenda of comparative musicology, one that is updated with the paradigms of modern evolutionary theory and scientific methodology. Ever since the field of comparative musicology became redefined as ethnomusicology in the mid-20th century, its original research agenda has been all but abandoned by musicologists, not least the overarching goal of cross-cultural musical comparison. We outline here five major themes that underlie the re-establishment of comparative musicology: (1) classification, (2) cultural evolution, (3) human history, (4) universals, and (5) biological evolution. Throughout the article, we clarify key ideological, methodological and terminological objections that have been levied against musical comparison. Ultimately, we argue for an inclusive, constructive, and multidisciplinary field that analyzes the world’s musical diversity, from the broadest of generalities to the most culture-specific particulars, with the aim of synthesizing the full range of theoretical perspectives and research methodologies available.

Savage, Brown - 2013 - Analytical Approaches to World Music.pdf

The structure of cross-cultural musical diversity

Rzeszutek, Tom, Savage, Patrick E., Brown, Steven

PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES 279 ( 1733 ) 1606 - 1612 2012.04

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted,  ISSN  0962-8452

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CantoCore: A new cross-cultural song classification scheme

Savage, Patrick E., Merritt, Emily, Rzeszutek, Tom, Brown, Steven

Analytical Approaches to World Music 2 ( 1 ) 87 - 137 2012

Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Accepted

Savage et al. - 2012 - Analytical Approaches to World Music.pdf