Testing hypotheses of music-culture coevolution with a global sample of 5,783 songs

Author / Creator

Cultural Evolution Society 2021 (2021)

Conferences

Cultural Evolution Society 2021 Q&A session 12: Music 2 (2021)

Available as

Online

Summary

Music - like language - is a human cultural universal that displays considerable cross-cultural variation and historical continuity. But while hypotheses about language (co)evolution have been test...

Music - like language - is a human cultural universal that displays considerable cross-cultural variation and historical continuity. But while hypotheses about language (co)evolution have been tested against large cross-cultural databases, hypotheses about music have not, principally because no such databases have been publicly available. We take advantage of a new public database of 5,783 songs from 991 societies coded for 37 "Cantometric'' features of musical style (theglobaljukebox.org; cf. Wood et al., this conference) to test three sets of pre-registered hypotheses about music-culture coevolution: 1) What is the primary determinant of musical style: song structure or social context? 2) What is the primary determinant of musical distribution: genetic history, language history, or geography? 3) What is the primary social determinant of musical style: economic subsistence or kinship intensity? Each set of hypotheses helps us paint a more complete picture of music's role in the cultural past of human evolution. We will test these competing hypotheses using latent variable modelling and phylogeographic methods, combining the Global Jukebox database of music codings with language phylogeny, genetic distances (GeLaTo), and social structure (Ethnographic Atlas; D-PLACE.org). By tying these strands of evidence together we will present a comprehensive and quantitative understanding of global music diversity and its role in the history of human society.

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