Cultural evolution of music

Abstract

Abstract. The concept of cultural evolution was fundamental to the foundation of 4 academic musicology and the subfield of comparative musicology, but largely 5 disappeared from discussion after World War II, despite a recent resurgence of 6 interest in cultural evolution in other fields. In this article, I draw on recent advances 7 in the scientific understanding of cultural evolution to clarify persistent 8 misconceptions about the roles of genes and progress in musical evolution and 9 review literature relevant to musical evolution ranging from macroevolution of 10 global song-style to microevolution of tune families.

Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics Project

“…Grauer’s modification maintains Lomax’s assumption of stasis that was inherent in most early Spencerian theories of cultural evolution (i.e., both view contemporary Pygmy and Bushman music as representing the nearly unchanged sounds of early humans tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago). In contrast, I propose a modification grounded in modern cultural evolutionary theory that explicitly recognizes the likelihood that all contemporary styles have changed (albeit possibly to varying degrees) through branching processes of “descent with modification” (Savage, Forthcoming; see Figure 3).…”

“…(b) My proposed revision of Lomax’s model, replacing his assumption of evolutionary stasis with the modern cultural evolutionary concept of branching “descent with modification”, using dashed arrows to incorporate the idea of horizontal transmission (e.g., cross-cultural borrowing). See Savage (Forthcoming) for further explanation and theoretical background.…”

“…Recently, fields such as linguistics and anthropology have addressed similar criticisms by adapting quantitative methods from evolutionary biology to understand cultural evolution (Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman, 1981; Levinson & Gray, 2012; Mace & Holden, 2005; Mesoudi, 2011; Richerson & Boyd, 2005; Whiten, Hinde, Stringer, & Laland, 2012). Although the degree to which such methods may be appropriately applied to music remains debated (see Savage, Forthcoming, for extensive review and discussion), several studies have attempted to use such methods to improve on cantometrics. My colleagues and I showed that it was possible to adapt the Analysis of Molecular Variance (AMOVA) – which quantifies genetic variation within and between populations – to quantify musical variation within and between populations (Rzeszutek et al, 2012).…”