Network of sounds - New research reveals the magic secret of human networks
Aug 2020, phys.org
On Synchronization, and human synchronization in particular:
There's a bunch of violinists in the room, all with head phones on. They all hear their own violin, as well as those of others. But each person is connected to only some of the others, creating a complex communication network, think of a criss-crossing links-and-nodes graph. But then, they slow down some of the connections, so there is no universal timing for the music they play. Instead, they fall in and out of sync with each other, depending on who they're connected to.
And then, they delay all the players, making it impossible to sync with anyone, and so each player ends up cancelling-out what they hear from all but one, so they can try to sync with that one person.
The main point of doing all this is so you can watch how people shift their attention from one player to the other, by the speed at which they're playing. (I think). And that means that ultimately, we can now study how a network functions when each node has it's own decision-making ability. A highway network full of autonomous car nodes, or a social network full of infobot nodes, or a society spreading a pandemic, of course.
via the Weizmann Institute, along with Stony Brook: Synchronization of complex human networks, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17540-7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-17540-7
The rhythm of change - What a drum-beat experiment reveals about cultural evolution
Oct 2020, phys.org
This experiment is awesome. Santa Fe Institute and Dan Sperber, and you know what that means. It goes like this:
120 non-musicians are given a drum, and asked to play Telephone. You may know this as Chinese Whispers, or a transmission chain, or iterated learning. It's meant to mimic the propagation of information through culture. After being broken into groups, the first person copies a recording of a drumbeat rhythm, and the second person copies not the recording but the first person, and the third person copies the second person, and so on. (That's the game of Telephone.)
The rationale is that musical instruments are literally physically constrained by the socioeoconomic status of the culture making them, and so instruments can be an ideal denominator for comparing something as complex as culture.
And the outcome was that by placing the drums in different arrangements, they found clear differences in the "evolution" of the reiterated rhythms. This suggests that ecological factors, such as physical distance and motor activity, can affect the evolution of cultural products, and these effects can even be measured.
Motor constraints influence cultural evolution of rhythm, Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2020). doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5178247. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33109010/
War songs and lullabies behind origins of music
Nov 2020, phys.org
Auditory cheesecake and a new evolutionary theory of the origins of music:
Music comes from the need for groups to impress allies and foes, and for parents to signal their attention to infants.The researchers also take issue with other music origin theories including that making music arose out of a need for social bonding, or that it is merely a fancy evolutionary byproduct with no real purpose—'auditory cheesecake' as the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker once called it.
It's not about sexual selection; it's not about bonding; it's about the audience:
"If we study music in traditional societies, we see it used consistently to form political alliances," said Hagen.Elaborate musical performances from war dances to military bands and even college marching bands, are often used to show a coalition's strength and impress outsiders. Hagen pointed out that many state visits include a performance by a national orchestra or military band. Studies also show that people can detect how well synchronized musicians are, and connect that higher synchrony to a coalition's strength."We need to invest a lot in infants since human babies are born helpless and need all sorts of help from the adults around them," said psychologist Samuel Mehr, director of Harvard's Music Lab. "The parent or caregiver needs a reliable way to signal to the infant that they are attending to them. But attention is a covert property of the mind. It's hard to determine if someone is actually paying attention to you." Directed song gives the infant a signal that the adult is paying attention to their needs, Mehr added. When singing, the adults cannot be talking to other people. The music also alerts the baby to the adult's physical location. "That's information that can't really be faked," he said.
Samuel A. Mehr et al, Origins of music in credible signaling, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2020). DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X20000345. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32843107/
Post Script:
AI program writes music and lyrics
May 2020, phys.org
OpenAI this week announced the creation of an open source system called Jukebox that creates unique melodies and harmonies along with lyrics and vocalizations in the styles of popular artists from a large field of musical genres.As an example, Jukebox does not yet compose larger musical themes such as choruses and repeating phrases.
