Related papers: Convergent evolution in a large cross-cultural dat…
Musical scales are used throughout the world, but the question of how they evolved remains open. Some suggest that scales based on the harmonic series are inherently pleasant, while others propose that scales are chosen that are easy to…
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…
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…
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 set of basic notes, or `scale', forms the basis of music. Scales are specific to specific genre of music. In this second article of the series we explore the development of various scales associated with western classical music, arguably…
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…
Music comprises two core structural components, melody and rhythm, that vary widely across cultures. Whether these components coevolve in a coupled way or follow independent trajectories remains unclear. We introduce a novel computational…
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…
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…
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…
To many people, music is a mystery. It is uniquely human, because no other species produces elaborate, well organized sound for no particular reason. It has been part of every known civilization on earth. It has become a very part of man's…
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…
We investigate correlations among pitches in several songs and pieces of piano music by mapping them to one-dimensional walks. Two kinds of correlations are studied, one is related to the real values of frequencies while they are treated…
The determination of cluster centers generally depends on the scale that we use to analyze the data to be clustered. Inappropriate scale usually leads to unreasonable cluster centers and thus unreasonable results. In this study, we first…
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…
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…
We investigate the dynamics of music creation style distributions to understand cultural evolution involving advanced intelligence. Using statistical modelling methods and several musical statistics extracted from datasets of popular music…
Quantification of stylistic differences between musical artists is of academic interest to the music community, and is also useful for other applications such as music information retrieval and recommendation systems. Information about…
Music has always been central to human culture, reflecting and shaping traditions, emotions, and societal changes. Technological advancements have transformed how music is created and consumed, influencing tastes and the music itself. In…