Current Biology
Volume 32, Issue 6, 28 March 2022, Pages 1395-1402.e8
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Report
Sequence alignment of folk song melodies reveals cross-cultural regularities of musical evolution

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.01.039Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Melodic evolution follows regular patterns across Japanese and English folk songs

  • Musical notes with stronger rhythmic functions are less likely to change

  • Note insertions/deletions (“indels”) are more common than substitutions

  • Substitutions tend to occur between neighboring notes

Summary

Culture evolves,1, 2, 3, 4, 5 but the existence of cross-culturally general regularities of cultural evolution is debated.6, 7, 8 As a diverse but universal cultural phenomenon, music provides a novel domain to test for the existence of such regularities.9, 10, 11, 12 Folk song melodies can be thought of as culturally transmitted sequences of notes that change over time under the influence of cognitive and acoustic/physical constraints.9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 Modeling melodies as evolving sequences constructed from an “alphabet” of 12 scale degrees16 allows us to quantitatively test for the presence of cross-cultural regularities using a sample of 10,062 melodies from musically divergent Japanese and English (British/American) folk song traditions.17,18 Our analysis identifies 328 pairs of highly related melodies, finding that note changes are more likely when they have smaller impacts on a song’s melody. Specifically, (1) notes with stronger rhythmic functions are less likely to change, and (2) note substitutions are most likely between neighboring notes. We also find that note insertions/deletions (“indels”) are more common than note substitutions, unlike genetic evolution where the reverse is true. Our results are consistent across English and Japanese samples despite major differences in their scales and tonal systems. These findings demonstrate that even a creative art form such as music is subject to evolutionary constraints analogous to those governing the evolution of genes, languages, and other domains of culture.

Keywords

cultural evolution
cross-cultural
music
sequence alignment

Data and code availability

All melodic sequences, metadata, and analysis code are publicly available at http://github.com/pesavage/melodic-evolution.

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6

Twitter: @PatrickESavage

7

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