“…Studies of classical music have found that melodic intervals are associated with particular historical periods (Rodriguez Zivic et al, 2013;Weiß et al, 2019;Harasim et al, 2021), and that tonal complexity and harmonic richness have increased over time ( Weiß et al, 2019;Serra-Peralta et al 2021). Studies of contemporary and popular music have tracked changes in a variety of music characteristics such as diversity, loudness, and the emotional valence of lyrics (Mauch et al, 2015;Serrà et al, 2012;Napier and Shamir, 2018;Brand et al, 2019), and have used detailed information on population structure and the distribution of cultural variants to try to understand the processes underlying such changes (Youngblood, 2019b;Klimek et al, 2019;Youngblood et al, 2021;Rosati et al, 2021). Experimental approaches have shown that rhythms and melodies increase in regularity over the course of transmission in a manner that is consistent with universal cognitive priors that are mediated by both individual experience and external factors (Ravignani et al, 2017;Jacoby et al, 2021;Lumaca and Baggio, 2017;Ravignani et al, 2018;Miton et al, 2020).…”