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

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

doi:10.31234/osf.io/zpv5w

Cited by 22 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 22 publications

(25 reference statements)

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“…Automating this process would allow us to potentially expand this preliminary analysis to include thousands or even millions of recordings. Comparing such automated musical analysis against samples of speech and birdsong should allow us to determine whether aspects of musical scales are specific to human music [4,11,13]. Meanwhile, comparison against cross-cultural data for perceptions of consonance should help to reveal the causal mechanisms underlying crosscultural musical regularities.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Chiba¹,

Ho²,

Sato³

et al. 2019

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The structure of musical scales has been proposed to reflect universal bioacoustic principles based on simple integer ratios. However, some researchers who have studied tuning in small samples of non-Western cultures have argued that such ratios are instead specific to Western music. To address this debate, we algorithmically analyzed and cross-culturally compared scale tunings within a global sample of 124 music recordings, including both instrumental and vocal music. Although we found great cross-cultural diversity in most scale degrees, we also found a strong cross-cultural tendency to include the simplest possible integer ratios within the octave (3:2 ratio [perfect 5th] and 4:3 ratio [perfect 4th]). This suggests that cultural diversity in musical scales is not without limit, but is constrained by general bioacoustic principles, such as harmonic consonance in group performance, that may shed light on the evolution of human music.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our goal was to address this lack of data by taking advantage of new algorithms for automatic scale tuning analysis [12]. Based on the integer ratio hypothesis and previous preliminary studies [3,4,9], we predicted that the simplest ratios such as the perfect 5 th (3:2) and perfect 4 th (4:3) would predominate cross-culturally.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Chiba¹,

Ho²,

Sato³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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“…These pitch classes often reflect small-integer frequency relationships which sound consonant together (e.g., the 3:2 frequency ratio underlying musical fifths, 4:3 ratios for fourths, etc. ; Bowling et al 2018;Gill & Purves 2009;Kuroyanagi et al 2019;McDermott et al 2010;Terhardt, 1984). By producing pitches that adhere to scales, groups of singing individuals effectively minimize uncertainty in fundamental frequency, thus maximizing harmony via spectral alignment (Sethares 2004).…”

Section: Melody Harmony and Vocal Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Music as a coevolved system for social bonding

Savage¹,

Loui²,

Tarr³

et al. 2020

Behav Brain Sci

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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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“…In future studies, we plan to expand the scope of our methods to better test our sensorimotor hypothesis and other hypotheses for the origins of musical structure. This includes expanding the sample of human songs as well as including instrumental music, speech, and animal song for comparison [8]. To do so, we need to refine and further automate our process (e.g., peak-picking, noise removal for melodic range analysis, quantification of imprecision, improved automatic pitch extraction to accommodate polyphonic music) to be able to analyze larger samples while making fewer manual judgments.…”

Section: Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Sato¹,

Six²,

Pfordresher³

et al. 2019

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Music throughout the world varies greatly, yet some musical features like scale structure display striking cross-cultural similarities. Are there musical laws or biological constraints that underlie this diversity? The “vocal mistuning” hypothesis proposes that cross-cultural regularities in musical scales arise from imprecision in vocal tuning, while the integer-ratio hypothesis proposes that they arise from perceptual principles based on psychoacoustic consonance. In order to test these hypotheses, we conducted automatic comparative analysis of 100 children’s and adult songs from throughout the world. We found that children’s songs tend to have narrower melodic range, fewer scale degrees, and less precise intonation than adult songs, consistent with motor limitations due to their earlier developmental stage. On the other hand, adult and children’s songs share some common tuning intervals at small-integer ratios, particularly the perfect 5th (~3:2 ratio). These results suggest that some widespread aspects of musical scales may be caused by motor constraints, but also suggest that perceptual preferences for simple integer ratios might contribute to cross-cultural regularities in scale structure. We propose a “sensorimotor hypothesis” to unify these competing theories.

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

Cited by 22 publications

References 22 publications

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

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

Music as a coevolved system for social bonding

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

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