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1. Music as a coevolved system for social bonding

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X20000333  

   Savage, Patrick E.; Loui, Psyche; Tarr, Bronwyn; Schachner, Adena; Glowacki, Luke; Mithen, Steven; Fitch, W. Tecumseh (January 2021, Behavioral and Brain Sciences)

   Abstract Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archeology, anthropology, biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience into a unified framework that accounts for the biological and cultural evolution of music. We argue that the evolution of musicality involves gene–culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors that initially arose and spread as cultural inventions had feedback effects on biological evolution because of their impact on social bonding. We emphasize the deep links between production, perception, prediction, and social reward arising from repetition, synchronization, and harmonization of rhythms and pitches, and summarize empirical evidence for these links at the levels of brain networks, physiological mechanisms, and behaviors across cultures and across species. Finally, we address potential criticisms and make testable predictions for future research, including neurobiological bases of musicality and relationships between human music, language, animal song, and other domains. The music and social bonding hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music. 

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2. Creativity and tradition: Music and bifocal stance theory

   https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x22001212  

   Loui, Psyche; Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth (January 2022, Behavioral and Brain Sciences)

   Abstract We argue that music can serve as a time-sensitive lens into the interplay between instrumental and ritual stances in cultural evolution. Over various timescales, music can switch between pursuing an end goal or not, and between presenting a causal opacity that is resolvable, or not. With these fluctuations come changes in the motivational structures that drive innovation versus copying. 

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3. Cortical encoding of melodic expectations in human temporal cortex

   https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.51784  

   Di Liberto, Giovanni M; Pelofi, Claire; Bianco, Roberta; Patel, Prachi; Mehta, Ashesh D; Herrero, Jose L; de Cheveigné, Alain; Shamma, Shihab; Mesgarani, Nima (March 2020, eLife)

   Humans engagement in music rests on underlying elements such as the listeners’ cultural background and interest in music. These factors modulate how listeners anticipate musical events, a process inducing instantaneous neural responses as the music confronts these expectations. Measuring such neural correlates would represent a direct window into high-level brain processing. Here we recorded cortical signals as participants listened to Bach melodies. We assessed the relative contributions of acoustic versus melodic components of the music to the neural signal. Melodic features included information on pitch progressions and their tempo, which were extracted from a predictive model of musical structure based on Markov chains. We related the music to brain activity with temporal response functions demonstrating, for the first time, distinct cortical encoding of pitch and note-onset expectations during naturalistic music listening. This encoding was most pronounced at response latencies up to 350 ms, and in both planum temporale and Heschl’s gyrus. 

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4. Gender Differences in the Global Music Industry: Evidence from Music Brainz and The Echo Nest

   Wang, Yixue; Horvát, Emőke-Ágnes (June 2019, Proceedings of the Thirteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM2019))

   With digital music consumption being at an all-time high, online music encyclopedia like MusicBrainz and music intelligence platforms like The Echo Nest are becoming increasingly important in identifying, organizing, and recommending music for listeners around the globe. As a byproduct, such sites collect comprehensive information about a vast amount of artists, their recorded songs, institutional support, and the collaborations between them. Using a unique mash-up of crowdsourced, curated, and algorithmically augmented data, this paper unpacks an unsolved problem that is key to promoting artistic innovation, i.e., how gender penetrates into artistic context leading to the globally perceived gender gap in the music industry. Specifically, we investigate gender-related differences in the sonic features of artists’ work, artists’ tagging by listeners, their record label affiliations, and collaboration networks. We find statistically significant disparities along all these dimensions. Moreover, the differences allow models to reliably identify the gender of songs’ creators and help elucidate the role of cultural and structural factors in sustaining inequality. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of gender differences in music production and inspire strategies that could improve the recognition of female artists and advance gender equity in artistic leadership and innovation. 

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5. Hip Hop as Computational Neuroscience: How the Hood Hacked our Global Rhythmic Nervous System

   https://doi.org/10.33137/ijidi.v6i1.37127  

   Eglash, Ron (May 2022, The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (IJIDI))

   Long before the internet provided us with a networked digital system, music exchanges had created a global networked analog system, built of recordings, radio broadcasts, and live performance. The features that allowed some audio formations to go viral, while others failed, fall at the intersection of three domains: access, culture, and cognition. We know how the explosive growth of the hip hop recording industry addressed the access problem, and how hip hop lyrics addressed cultural needs. But why does hip hop make your ass shake? This essay proposes that hip hop artists were creating an innovation in brain-to-brain connectivity. That is to say, there are deep parts of the limbic system that had not previously been connected to linguistic centers in the combination of neural and social pathways that hip hop facilitated. This research is not an argument for using computational neuroscience to analyze hip hop. Rather, it is asking what hip hop artists accomplished as the street version of computational neuroscientists; and, how they strategically deployed Black music traditions to rewire the world’s global rhythmic nervous system for new cognitive, cultural, and political alignments and sensibilities. 

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