The Global Jukebox: A public database of performing arts and culture

Abstract

The lack of standardized cross-cultural databases has impeded scientific understanding of the role of the performing arts in other domains of human society. This paper introduces the Global Jukebox (theglobaljukebox.org) as a resource for comparative and cross-cultural study of the performing arts and culture. Its core is the Cantometrics dataset, encompassing standardized codings on 37 aspects of musical style for 5,779 traditional songs from 992 societies. The Cantometrics dataset has been cleaned and checked for reliability and accuracy. Also being released are seven additional datasets coding and describing instrumentation, conversation, popular music, vowel and consonant placement, breath management, social factors, and societies. For the first time, all digitized Global Jukebox data are being made available in open-access, machine-readable format, linked with streaming audiovisual files to the maximum extent allowed while respecting copyright and the wishes of culture-bearers. The data are cross-indexed with the Database of Peoples, Languages, and Cultures (D-PLACE) to allow researchers to test hypotheses about worldwide aesthetic patterns and traditions, including earlier findings by Alan Lomax and his research team regarding coevolutionary relationships between the performing arts, social structure and cultural history. The Global Jukebox adds a large and detailed global database of the performing arts to enlarge our understanding of human cultural diversity.

Cultural evolution and music

“…Despite its youth, the study of the cultural evolution of music has resulted in some important insights. For example, research on traditional and folk music have revealed that scales around the world have a tendency to converge towards similar patterns (McBride and Tlusty, 2019;Brown and Jordania, 2013;Kuroyanagi et al, 2019), musical variation is correlated with social complexity (Lomax, 1968;Wood et al, 2021) and sometimes population history (Brown et al, 2014; but see Matsumae et al, 2021), and that certain styles of music are reliably associated with particular behavioral contexts across cultures (Mehr et al, 2019) according to their acoustic features (Mehr et al, 2018;Hilton et al, 2021). 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).…”

“…Research on the cultural evolution of traditional and folk music was pioneered by early comparative musicologists (Nettl and Bohlman, 1991;Savage and Brown, 2013) and reached a temporary peak in the middle of the 20th century in the work of Alan Lomax's Cantometrics Project. Lomax compared thousands of songs from hundreds of societies around the world using a standardized song classi cation scheme, providing the rst large-scale data for cross-cultural musical comparisons and arguing that musical style re ected both cultural history and social structure (Lomax, 1968;Lomax, 1980;Lomax and Berkowitz, 1972;Savage, 2019;Wood et al, 2021). Although some of the Cantometrics Project's methods and ndings have been subject to debate (e.g.…”

“…ritual, dance, infancy), and the primary context in which a song is used is associated with certain acoustic features (Mehr et al, 2019) and reliably recognized by both adults (Mehr et al, 2018) and children (Hilton et al, 2021). Variation in musical styles across societies also appears to be robustly correlated with social complexity (Lomax, 1968;Wood et al, 2021). The datasets used in both sets of studies are available online as the Natural History of Song and the Global Jukebox , respectively, and we 2 3 look forward to seeing how researchers use them to address other fundamental questions related to musical diversity and evolution.…”

Comparative musicology: The science of the world’s music

“…A. Grauer, , 2011Lomax, 1968Lomax, , 1976Lomax, , 1980Lomax, , 1989Lomax & Arensberg, 1977;Lomax & Berkowitz, 1972). Lomax's daughter, Anna Lomax Wood, myself, and many collaborators have also published posthumous meta-reviews attempting to address and synthesize many of the shorter critiques and controversies surrounding Cantometrics (Savage, 2018;Wood, 2018bWood, , 2018a, republished Lomax's detailed classification schemes and training tapes for coding songs (Cantometrics), dance (Choreometrics), speech (Parlametrics), and more (Wood, 2020), and digitized and published the full Cantometrics coded data and audio recordings in the form of the "Global Jukebox", containing over 5,000 songs from almost 1,000 societies (Wood et al, 2021) (Fig. To summarize, Lomax led a large team of collaborators to collect and curate this large sample of traditional songs from throughout the world and analyze them according to the standardized "Cantometric" classification scheme based on 37 variables of musical style.…”

“…Lomax's polarizing personality undoubtedly played a role (A. Seeger, 2006;Szwed, 2010;Wood, 2018b), as did the fact that the raw Cantometric data were never made available for others to analyze until 2021 (Wood et al, 2021). But probably more important than these contingencies was the fact that the period during the 1950s and 1960s during which Lomax conceived and realized the Cantometrics project came at a turbulent time in world history when radical change was afoot and the field was in the midst of an identity shift from "comparative musicology" to "ethnomusicology".…”