Phylogenetic reconstruction of the cultural evolution of electronic music via dynamic community detection (1975–1999)

Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories

“…Similarly, while our delta-score analysis suggests similar levels of horizontal and vertical transmission as found in previous analyses of language evolution (delta-scores ranging from roughly 0.2~0.4; cf. Gray et al, 2010;Greenhill et al, 2017), precise specification of these mechanisms of horizontal and vertical transmission in musical evolution will require more explicit models of the evolutionary process (Youngblood et al, 2021).…”

Cultural Evolution and Music

“…One study suggests that diversity in pitch transitions, timbre, and loudness is going down (Serrà et al, 2012; though see critique by Fink, 2013). However, others have found that diversity in contemporary music is either remaining relatively stable, based on pop charts that capture increasingly small fractions of global output and probably underestimate the trend (Mauch et al, 2015), or increasing, based on the rapid diversi cation of the communities of artists producing the music (electronic music: Youngblood et al, 2021;metal: Koch et al, 2020). Most recently, researchers found that changes in diversity over time vary greatly across genres, and that pop charts do in fact capture less diversity than broader corpora (Negro et al, 2022).…”

“…Researchers have been constructing collaboration networks of music for decades (Gleiser and Danon, 2003;Guimerà et al, 2005;Teitelbaum et al, 2008), but they are increasingly being used for more formal hypothesis testing. In the last couple of years researchers have traced the cultural transmission of music samples through networks of hip-hop and electronic producers (Youngblood, 2019a), explored how mentorship and collaboration with elites in uences the success of up-and-coming DJs (Janosov et al, 2020), and used a dynamic collaboration network to reconstruct a cultural phylogeny of electronic music (Youngblood et al, 2021). Other notable uses of network methods in research on contemporary music include mapping cover songs to determine the in uence of di erent genres on one another (Ortega, 2021), and using the position of albums in an evolving co-occurrence network of user-generated tags to understand how heterogeneity and novelty in uence popularity and cultural signi cance (Monechi et al, 2017).…”

“…Genres, the 11 units of musical diversity thought to be most relevant for conservation (Grant, 2014), are notoriously di cult to identify due to their fuzzy boundaries and hierarchical structures. Methods from cultural evolutionary research based on auditory similarity (Mauch et al, 2015), instrument co-occurrence (Percino et al, 2014), and community structure (Youngblood et al, 2021) could be used to distinguish between neighboring genres and assess their relative endangerment, based on population size and other factors. Additionally, cultural evolutionary theory provides a framework for understanding the coevolution of di erent cultural practices, which often reinforce and stabilize one another.…”

Phylomemetics as a framework for bibliographic synthesis

“…Music often has strong connections to past works. The evolution of electronic music has been reconstructed in one project (Youngblood et al, 2021). Other projects look at the evolution of music across genres (Savage, 2020) and across cultures (Savage et al, 2020).…”