Large-scale iterated singing experiments reveal oral transmission mechanisms underlying music evolution

Manuel Anglada-Tort · Peter M. C. Harrison · Harin Lee · Nori Jacoby

71 citations0/0 files storedCurrent Biology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Language and cultural evolution Neuroscience and Music Perception Animal Vocal Communication and Behavior

Abstract

Speech and song have been transmitted orally for countless human generations, changing over time under the influence of biological, cognitive, and cultural pressures. Cross-cultural regularities and diversities in human song are thought to emerge from this transmission process, but testing how underlying mechanisms contribute to musical structures remains a key challenge. Here, we introduce an automatic online pipeline that streamlines large-scale cultural transmission experiments using a sophisticated and naturalistic modality: singing. We quantify the evolution of 3,424 melodies orally transmitted across 1,797 participants in the United States and India. This approach produces a high-resolution characterization of how oral transmission shapes melody, revealing the emergence of structures that are consistent with widespread musical features observed cross-culturally (small pitch sets, small pitch intervals, and arch-shaped melodic contours). We show how the emergence of these structures is constrained by individual biases in our participants-vocal constraints, working memory, and cultural exposure-which determine the size, shape, and complexity of evolving melodies. However, their ultimate effect on population-level structures depends on social dynamics taking place during cultural transmission. When participants recursively imitate their own productions (individual transmission), musical structures evolve slowly and heterogeneously, reflecting idiosyncratic musical biases. When participants instead imitate others' productions (social transmission), melodies rapidly shift toward homogeneous structures, reflecting shared structural biases that may underpin cross-cultural variation. These results provide the first quantitative characterization of the rich collection of biases that oral transmission imposes on music evolution, giving us a new understanding of how human song structures emerge via cultural transmission.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 71 citations exist upstream.

References

2006Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market 2012Cultural evolution: how Darwinian theory can explain human culture and synthesize the social sciences 2006The study of ethnomusicology: thirty-one issues and concepts 1993The Analysis and Cognition of Basic Melodic Structures: The Implication-Realization Model 2007Language Evolution by Iterated Learning With Bayesian Agents 2011Universals in the world’s musics 2010Language evolution in the laboratory 2003Iterated Learning: A Framework for the Emergence of Language

Cited by

2024Large language models predict human sensory judgments across six modalities 2023Group singing is globally dominant and associated with social context 2026Cultural evolution of music and language 2024Core principles of melodic organisation emerge from transmission chains with random melodies 2025Mechanisms of cultural diversity in urban populations 2025

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.