Cultural Evolution and Music

Abstract

The universality and diversity of music in human societies make it an important research model for understanding how cultural features change over time and space. In this chapter, we review research on the cultural evolution of music, broken down into three major approaches: (i) corpus-based approaches that use large datasets to infer evolutionary patterns, (ii) experimental approaches that explore cultural transmission and transformation, and (iii) research on ‘music-like’ behaviors in non-human species, such as bird and whale song, that highlights shared mechanisms and future directions. Finally, we discuss applications of this research to issues like musical endangerment, copyright enforcement, and algorithmic inequality. Given the diversity of musical datasets that have yet to be fully leveraged, we think that music has the potential to become a powerful research model for cultural evolution.