University of London
Goldsmiths
Cultural Evolution of Music
Cultural systems like language and music emerge from the complex interplay of human biology, cognition, and the transmission of knowledge across generations. However, explaining how these factors shape the evolution of human culture remains a key challenge in cognitive science. Our research combines computational techniques with large-scale behavioral experiments to study how cultural transmission shapes musical systems, aesthetics, and creativity.
We study cultural evolution artificially by running large-scale transmission chain experiments, where participants create music by tapping or singing (e.g., rhythms, melodies) and their creations are passed to the next generations of participants. For example, for singing, participants hear random sequences of sounds and imitate them by singing back. Their vocal productions, which are analysed online, become the input stimuli for the next participants, forming transmission chains. Over iterations, motor and cognitive biases cause the emergence of diverse musical structures, making musical systems easier to learn and transmit over time. Such experimental approaches allow us to quantify the causal role of underlying mechanisms (e.g., cognitive biases, culture) on the evolution of complex cultural systems (Anglada-Tort et al., 2023).
Publications
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Anglada-Tort, M., Harrison, P. M., Lee, H., & Jacoby, N. (2023). Large-scale singing experiments reveal oral transmission mechanism underlying music evolution. Current Biology, 33, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.02.070
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Jacoby, N., et al. (2024). Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries. Nature Human Behavior (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01800-9