Related papers: Cross-cultural data shows musical scales evolved t…
Scales, sets of discrete pitches that form the basis of melodies, are thought to be one of the most universal hallmarks of music. But we know relatively little about cross-cultural diversity of scales or how they evolved. To remedy this, we…
The standard theory of musical scales since antiquity has been based on harmony, rather than melody. While recent analyses provide mixed support for a role of melody as well as harmony, we lack a comparative analysis based on cross-cultural…
One of the fundamental questions of cultural evolutionary research is how individual-level processes scale up to generate population-level patterns. Previous studies in music have revealed that frequency-based bias (e.g. conformity and…
The mathematics of musical intervals and scales has been extensively studied. Vastly simplified, our ears seem to prefer intervals whose frequency ratios have small numerator and denominator, such as 2:1 (octave), 3:2 (perfect fifth), 4:3…
A method is proposed which enables one to produce musical compositions by using transposition in place of harmonic progression. A transposition scale is introduced to provide a set of intervals commensurate with the musical scale, such as…
Measurement is a fundamental building block of numerous scientific models and their creation. This is in particular true for data driven science. Due to the high complexity and size of modern data sets, the necessity for the development of…
Ordered response scales are ubiquitous in economics, but their interpretation rests on an untested assumption: that numerical labels reflect equal psychological intervals. The contribution of this paper is to provide a systematic assessment…
Both, human appreciation of music and musical genres, transcend time and space. The universality of musical genres and associated musical scales is intimately linked to the physics of sound and the special characteristics of human acoustic…
We develop aspects of music theory related to harmony, such as scales, chord formation and improvisation from a combinatorial perspective. The goal is to provide a foundation for this subject by deriving the basic structure from a few…
The number of possible melodies is unfathomably large, yet despite this virtually unlimited potential for melodic variation, melodies from different societies can be surprisingly similar. The motor constraint hypothesis accounts for certain…
This study explores the extent to which national music preferences reflect underlying cultural values. We collected long-term popular music data from YouTube Music Charts across 62 countries, encompassing both Western and non-Western…
Compositional understanding is crucial for human intelligence, yet it remains unclear whether contemporary vision models exhibit it. The dominant machine learning paradigm is built on the premise that scaling data and model sizes will…
Music is a complex socio-cultural construct, which fascinates researchers in diverse fields, as well as the general public. Understanding the historical development of music may help us understand perceptual and cognition, while also…
Research on how humans perceive aesthetics in shapes, colours, and music has predominantly focused on Western populations, limiting our understanding of how cultural environments shape aesthetic preferences. We present a large-scale…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming very popular and are used for many different purposes, including creative tasks in the arts. However, these models sometimes have trouble with specific reasoning tasks, especially those that involve…
The consistency of the species abundance distribution across diverse communities has attracted widespread attention. In this paper, I argue that the consistency of pattern arises because diverse ecological mechanisms share a common symmetry…
If a cultural feature is transmitted over generations and exposed to stochastic selection when spreading in a population, its evolution may be governed by statistical laws and be partly predictable, as in the case of genetic evolution.…
Cultural-scale models of full text documents are prone to over-interpretation by researchers making unintentionally strong socio-linguistic claims (Pechenick et al., 2015) without recognizing that even large digital libraries are merely…
Many cultural traits characterizing intelligent behaviors are now thought to be transmitted through statistical learning, motivating us to study its effects on cultural evolution. We conduct a large-scale music data analysis and observe…
Music evokes profound emotions, yet the universality of emotional descriptors across languages remains debated. A key challenge in cross-cultural research on music emotion is biased stimulus selection and manual curation of taxonomies,…