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Musical evolution in the lab exhibits rhythmic universals

Nature Human Behaviour volume 1, Article number: 0007 (2017) Cite this article

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Abstract

Music exhibits some cross-cultural similarities, despite its variety across the world. Evidence from a broad range of human cultures suggests the existence of musical universals1, here defined as strong regularities emerging across cultures above chance. In particular, humans demonstrate a general proclivity for rhythm2, although little is known about why music is particularly rhythmic and why the same structural regularities are present in rhythms around the world. We empirically investigate the mechanisms underlying musical universals for rhythm, showing how music can evolve culturally from randomness. Human participants were asked to imitate sets of randomly generated drumming sequences and their imitation attempts became the training set for the next participants in independent transmission chains. By perceiving and imitating drumming sequences from each other, participants turned initially random sequences into rhythmically structured patterns. Drumming patterns developed into rhythms that are more structured, easier to learn, distinctive for each experimental cultural tradition and characterized by all six statistical universals found among world music1; the patterns appear to be adapted to human learning, memory and cognition. We conclude that musical rhythm partially arises from the influence of human cognitive and biological biases on the process of cultural evolution3.

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Figure 1: Cultural transmission over generations by iterated learning.
Figure 2: Frequency distributions of IOIs in drumming sequences for each chain (rows) and generation (columns).
Figure 3: Emergence of rhythmic riffs and cultural specificity.
Figure 4: Statistical universals in durational patterns.

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Acknowledgements

A.R. was supported by Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Vlaanderen grant no. V439315N, and European Research Council (ERC) grant (283435 ABACUS, to B. de Boer). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We thank P. Filippi, B. Thompson, B. de Boer, H. Little, S. van der Ham, N. Chr. Hansen, J. Iversen, D. Bowling, T. Grossi, A.C. Miralles, P. Norton, V. Spinosa, Y.-H. Su, P. Tinits and K. Smith, as well as all members of the Centre for Language Evolution (Edinburgh), AI-Lab (VUB Brussels), Biolinguistics (Barcelona) and attendants of Evolang XI, IBAC XXV, Statistical Learning 2015 and the DZG Graduate Meeting 2016 for their comments and advice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Language Evolution, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD, UK

    Andrea Ravignani, Tania Delgado & Simon Kirby

  2. Artificial Intelligence Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, 1050, Belgium

    Andrea Ravignani

  3. Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, 92093-0515, California, USA

    Tania Delgado

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  1. Andrea Ravignani
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Contributions

A.R. and S.K. conceived the study. A.R., T.D. and S.K. designed research. T.D. performed the research. A.R. and S.K. wrote the Python scripts for the data analysis and experimental testing. A.R., T.D. and S.K. analysed the data and wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Andrea Ravignani.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary information

Supplementary Figure 1, Supplementary Tables 1-3, Supplementary Notes, Supplementary Methods (PDF 267 kb)

Raw data

The patterns heard and produced by each participant are organized and sorted by number of experimental chain, number of drumming pattern, and participant number (equivalent to generation number) within an experimental transmission chain. (CSV 386 kb)

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Ravignani, A., Delgado, T. & Kirby, S. Musical evolution in the lab exhibits rhythmic universals. Nat Hum Behav 1, 0007 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-016-0007

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