Evolving building blocks of rhythm: how human cognition creates music via cultural transmission

Abstract

Why does musical rhythm have the structure it does? Musical rhythm, in all its cross-cultural diversity, exhibits commonalities across world cultures. Traditionally, music research has been split into two fields. Some scientists focused on musicality, namely the human biocognitive predispositions for music, with an emphasis on cross-cultural similarities. Other scholars investigated music, seen as a cultural product, focusing on the variation in world musical cultures. Recent experiments found deep connections between music and musicality, reconciling these opposing views. Here, we address the question of how individual cognitive biases affect the process of cultural evolution of music. Data from two experiments are analyzed using two complementary techniques. In the experiments, participants hear drumming patterns and imitate them. These patterns are then given to the same or another participant to imitate. The structure of these initially random patterns is tracked along experimental "generations." Frequentist statistics show how participants' biases are amplified by cultural transmission, making drumming patterns more structured. Structure is achieved faster in transmission within rather than between participants. A Bayesian model approximates the motif structures participants learned and created. Our data and models suggest that individual biases for musicality may shape the cultural transmission of musical rhythm.

Rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations: a cross‐species perspective

“…Iterated learning experiments have been done to better understand linguistic morphology, poetry, and musical rhythm . − Iterated learning experiments where participants imitate and transmit nonsense syllable sequences could be used to show whether, and if so how, cultural transmission amplifies domain‐general biases resulting in rhythmic patterns of speech. This iterated learning approach can be integrated with neurophysiological measures .…”

The Evolution of Rhythm Processing

“…Lacking a time machine to directly witness early human evolution, a comparative approach is key to understanding how rhythm processing evolved in our species [4,[55][56][57][58][59]. Comparisons within humans between cognitive domains, individuals, cultures, and developmental stages are illuminating [60][61][62][63][64], but cross-species comparisons can highlight which behavioral features and neural systems are crucial for a species to develop rhythmic competence and can help reconstruct both when and why these features or systems evolved. The presence or absence of features of rhythmic competence in other animals can be mapped to evolutionary gains (or losses) of the sub-components underlying modern human rhythmicity.…”

Cumulative culture in the laboratory: methodological and theoretical challenges

“…Moreover, there are already some experimental results suggesting that single participants simply do not follow the same trajectories as traditions with multiple individuals. For instance, Claidière et al [47] have found, in a transmission chain with baboons, a higher performance and transmission fidelity in traditions with multiple participants than in individuals presented with their own earlier outputs (but see [78]).…”