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28| Music Evolution & Empirical Aesthetics — Manuel Anglada Tort
122 Plays7 months ago
Music may be magical. But it is also rooted in the material world. As such it can be the subject of empirical inquiry.
How does what we are told of a performer influence our appreciation of the performance? Does sunshine change our listening habits? How do rhythms and melodies change as they are passed along, as in a game of Chinese whispers?
Our guest is Manuel Anglada Tort, a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has investigated all those topics. We discuss the fields of Empirical Aesthetics and cultural evolution experiments as applied to music.
Chapters
(00:00) Intro
(03:35) Start of conversation: Music Psychology and Empirical Aesthetics
(07:54) Genomics and Musical Ability
(18:25) Weather's Influence on Music Preferences
(31:57) The Repeated Recording Illusion
(43:24) Empirical Aesthetics: Does Analysis Boost or Deflate Wonder?
(49:59) Music Evolution and Cultural Systems
(52:18) Simulating Music Evolution in the Lab
(1:01:27) The Role of Memory and Cognitive Biases in Music
(1:05:33) Comparing Language and Music Evolution
(1:20:37) The Impact of Physical and Cognitive Constraints on Music
(1:31:37) Audio Appendix
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Music as a Magical Multiverse
00:00:01
Speaker
I'm Ted Robinson and this is Multiverses. Music can be magical, otherworldly.
00:00:08
Speaker
Beethoven described it as the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge. Yet this magic is tied to the material facts of our existence, and often in surprising and nuanced ways. The songs that we listen to might depend on the weather, for example, or how much we appreciate a particular piece of music might vary according to what we've been told of its performance. And our musical abilities are partially explained by features of our genetic makeup.
00:00:35
Speaker
Our guest this week is Manuel Anglada Torte, a lecturer at Goldsmiths University of London. And he's investigated all of these issues. He's a researcher in the field of empirical aesthetics, which tries to measure the features of the world which influence our aesthetic experiences, such as experiences of music.
Empirical Aesthetics and the 'Snap to Grid' Phenomenon
00:00:55
Speaker
He's also interested in music evolution.
00:00:58
Speaker
We've talked previously on this podcast about language evolution, and I strongly recommend the episode with Simon Kirby, a pioneer of that field. But to give a very brief summary of how music evolution experiments work, imagine a rhythm that is completely random, so just a series of taps that have haphazard intervals between them.
00:01:22
Speaker
record that and play it back to a person and get them to mimic it, get them to copy it. Record their response and play that back to a second participant and record that and play it back to a third participant and so on and so on. Keep passing this rhythm down through generations and you'll find that it changes. Now, if you've ever used a drawing program or image editing program, it often has a snap to grid feature.
00:01:50
Speaker
And what these experiments reveal is that the human mind has a kind of snapped grid feature for music. So these rhythms that start completely random, they change, but they don't remain random. They kind of get snapped to a particular grid and they end up having kind of integer ratios between the beats.
00:02:15
Speaker
And this is true not only of rhythm, but also of experiments with pitch, which we'll discuss as well. So for example, you can start off with completely random notes and pass them down through generations. They will end up having the same, the differences in the pitches will end up being familiar to anyone who's studied music or
00:02:40
Speaker
Not only that, other musical features will emerge. So for example, you're likely to get arch contours emerging where you have a series of rising and falling notes, even if you started off with a completely flat pattern. So this is really fascinating. I've done something with this episode that I've not done previously. There is an audio appendix and you can listen to some of these transmission chains. You can also listen to an excerpt of Jailhouse Rock by Elvis Presley for reasons which will become
00:03:10
Speaker
apparent in this conversation. So I think this is a real feast for the mind and for the ears as well. So I hope you enjoy. Hi, Manuel. I'm glad I thought. Welcome to multiverses.
00:03:40
Speaker
Hi, thanks for inviting me here. So I always struggle to describe what it is that I do to my mum because I work on, I guess, a few different things. And it strikes me that you're also someone who's got lots of different kind of research areas that maybe coalesce around a few themes. But how is it that you would just describe, I don't know, elevate a pitch of what you do?
Understanding Music Psychology
00:04:02
Speaker
Yeah, well, I have this problem as well. I'm not sure if my parents understand perfectly well what they do.
00:04:12
Speaker
In a very general sense, I guess I could say that I'm working in a fascinating field that people call it sometimes music psychology or the psychology of music. And this is really just the scientific study of the psychological processes that allow us to create, perceive, process, and respond to music.
00:04:37
Speaker
So it's really all about all the psychological machinery involved in this very weird and fascinating thing that humans do, which is, you know, creating music and being so moved by music of different sorts. I think when people hear the phrase music psychology, it might bring to the mind some sort of like, I don't know, means of treating particular, I don't know, illnesses and neuroses and things, but really it's much more
00:05:08
Speaker
about understanding what it is that makes music tick, I guess. And yeah, what's also interesting to me is that it kind of seems to sit within this field of empirical aesthetics, which is something that I'd never heard of recently, but then I see that many of your collaborators are based at institutes for empirical aesthetics. Do you have like just a kind of brief summary of what empirical aesthetics means as well?
00:05:36
Speaker
Well, before that, I guess something to say is that I think what is interesting about this field of music psychology is that it's really bridging between different many disciplines and one of them is more in the applied
00:05:54
Speaker
site of things, so music therapy and how we can use this very powerful connection of music and the brain to treat in a very non-invasive way some disorders like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's but also help with all sorts of other transferable skills like reading, maybe learning a second language and all sorts of different skills. That would still be part of maybe music cognition or music psychology, this part of
00:06:24
Speaker
therapy. And then another branch, as you say, is this empirical aesthetics. And this is kind of a broader field that is very interested in philosophical, big, old questions of what is beauty and why are we moved when we see like a nice landscape or a pretty face, but also when we read a poem or when we listen to our favorite song.
00:06:52
Speaker
And I guess it's approaching this question using empirical methods, so controlled experiments that allow us to tell the causal role of different mechanisms and neuroscience and all of these scientific tools to kind of approach these questions of beauty. Yeah. So it's sort of less the armchair philosophy side of aesthetics and more the cognitive science. What are the experiments that we can do measure people's reactions to
00:07:23
Speaker
works of art or other aesthetic objects, music, or just viewing a landscape, I suppose. And I suppose not just measure reactions, but also look at the mechanisms that drive the production of those things as well. It was really interesting looking through your various papers, just how diverse the things that you've worked on are.
00:07:46
Speaker
And I think we want to focus on the music evolution side of things. But maybe if we will get to that, there's a whole bunch of things we could talk about. Maybe let's start with the quickest one, which is just like this genome-wide association study. I think it's the quickest to talk about because it's probably where we both have the least to say.
Genetics and Musical Abilities: Can You Clap to a Beat?
00:08:05
Speaker
But I do think it's a really fascinating study in itself. So maybe tell us about how genomics is being used to look at music.
00:08:14
Speaker
Well, I'm not sure if that's the quickest in that it's a very complicated study with many authors. And I'm just one of these many authors. So I had like, I played a role in this study, but that's not one of the studies that I've been really involved in. But nevertheless, it's a very nice example of this interdisciplinary of music. So in this case, there is this
00:08:40
Speaker
very interesting question of thinking about how we humans synchronize to external cue events. And by this, I mean a musical beat. So if you think about it, this is very
00:08:55
Speaker
It's very remarkable, right? We do it without thinking. So we, if you listen to a song now, you can, even without thinking or even, you cannot even stop it, you will need to tap with your foot into the beat of the song or you need to dance. And even though this is very effortless for us,
00:09:12
Speaker
It's computationally and cognitively very challenging and very complicated. How do we manage to do this? How do we manage to synchronize with someone when we walk next to them or synchronize to a song without even thinking about it? And this turns out also to be a very unique feature of humans. Very few animals can synchronize with the flexibility and complexity in which we can.
00:09:43
Speaker
I guess this opens this question of why is this important and how do we manage to do it? And why are some people better at others, right? And in this kind of question, there is always these two big components.
00:10:00
Speaker
the nature kind of biological, genetic factors that might explain this, that might explain why some people are better at synchronizing to music than others. But then there is the exposure reasons, right? It could be that just by training and being exposed to different music or being forced to learn the piano, there are many years can also make you better.
00:10:27
Speaker
tell apart the contribution of these two big forces, one very powerful scientific method is this large scale GWAS studies, genetic studies, where you can take data from thousands of participants
00:10:45
Speaker
And you get data from all of their genetic architecture based on this genetic test and try to explain whether variation in the genes in this way, explain any difference in the behavior, in this case, in the ability to synchronize to music or not.
00:11:04
Speaker
And what the lead authors of this paper show is that to some extent there is certain percentage that can be explained, that can be attributed to our genetic architecture or our genetic variation. Yeah, I think it is really interesting as just an example of how
00:11:28
Speaker
these kind of genome-wide association studies are being applied to so many different things. It's something that one hears about, but just to see how it's being used in many different fields or such specific ways, I think is really insightful. Some things that stuck out for me, which just the size of the study, it was like over 600,000 people
00:11:52
Speaker
that you surveyed, and it's because, I guess, someone managed to get 23 and me to agree to have this very simple question, which was, you know, how well can you clap in time to a beat, I think. And then, of course, you separately did a smaller study, but still I think of maybe around a thousand people or so, where you tested
00:12:18
Speaker
if that self-reporting is accurate. And so you got people to actually take an online experiment, testing whether, listening to a beat and then tapping it out and
00:12:32
Speaker
measuring up the quality of that correlation between, yes, I am very good at tapping to a beat and actually being good at tapping to a beat. So yeah, a really wonderful illustration of how these techniques have been used. Yeah, and if I can say something about this is that my involvement in this paper is kind of funny in that this has been potentially the easiest
00:12:58
Speaker
task or the easiest goal scientifically, but one of the most difficult technically that I have to do. So this involvement in this study comes from when I started my postdoc in the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt in Germany.
00:13:17
Speaker
in the group led by Nori Jacobi, who has been doing a lot of amazing work on studying rhythm production and perception in the lab. And when Raina Borden from the GWAS study approached Nori, the goal was we have this situation where we have all of this large data set
00:13:40
Speaker
And we have this self-report question that we need to validate. Do people who say that can tap in time actually can tap in time? And do those who say no are actually bad tappers? So the goal really, our goal was just to come up with a measure to validate this scientifically. So in theory, it's very simple.
00:14:03
Speaker
But technically it's very complex because to collect data from a thousand participants on bit synchronization, these are experiments where people tap in time with their finger to like a music or to like some external metronome. And then you measure the synchronize in like millisecond precision to do this online.
00:14:25
Speaker
is actually very complicated because when online calls or online software and stuff, it's very inaccurate. It has all sorts of latencies and time inaccuracies. So our task was to come up with this method to be able to brand this large scale tapping study so we could just validate this very simple question.
00:14:47
Speaker
Yeah, I'm really familiar with all these problems of using the messy hardware of reality to measure things. My bread and butter is measuring mobile networks. We spent a lot of time thinking about how to measure latency.
00:15:08
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, really interesting. And it's quite, I mean, it's just a fascinating result in itself that actually people are fairly good at assessing their own abilities in terms of clapping, you know, rhythmically. So, you know, that on its own is an interesting result. One thing I couldn't figure out is, and we chat about this over email, I don't think you have an answer either, is the researchers did find that there was
00:15:36
Speaker
dozens of genes, I think over 60
00:15:41
Speaker
60 areas in the genome that are associated with the ability to clap rhythmically, or at least associated with a positive answer on, yes, I can clap. And I'm sort of wondering if some of those associations are real, but maybe there's a few people, some proportion of people are just arrogant and will think that they're good clappers and aren't. And so maybe there's also some like arrogance genes mixed in, but there must,
00:16:10
Speaker
If this study has not already been done, I'm sure someone's looking at whether there is an overconfidence set of genes. This is an excellent question. And we did think about this in many ways, because when you kind of develop these experiments, of course,
00:16:29
Speaker
you need to really make sure that you can trust this self-report or not, and you spend all of this time and resources to collect this data, you really want to think about trying to make sure that you can validate this. And one way, perhaps not perfect, but one way in which we do that is that
00:16:46
Speaker
we not only correlate this behavioral tapping data with the self-report, the original self-report of yes and no, but we also correlated them with other measures of self-report. And one of them in particular is something like how confident are you
00:17:04
Speaker
that you can tap in time to a musical beat from one to seven. And here as well, we see this good correlation with tapping behavior and your self-report confidence, for example. Another way in which we do it is that we correlate this tapping data with your years of musical training. And here as well, we see a correlation. So participants who have more years of formal musical training
00:17:33
Speaker
also show a higher accuracy in their tapping behavior. So these are little things that we can use to build more confidence in trusting the results. But of course, it's true that there is always this problem when we use a self-report. There is always some bias that might enter there for different response biases of participants.
00:17:59
Speaker
Yeah, it's such a lovely study and I'm intrigued to see if at some point 23andMe start saying, oh yeah, you should try becoming a drummer or something, or maybe you have all the traits to do this. Yeah, maybe we can talk about some of the other kind of intriguing things in
00:18:23
Speaker
or angles on this. So yeah, another very large study or sort of in terms of the amount of data is
00:18:32
Speaker
you looked at correlations with weather and the kind of music that people listen to, which I thought was, you know, it's clearly something that we all experience, like our mood changes and our preferences change with the weather, at least anecdotally. But you sort of managed to show, yeah, this is something that really does happen. And some of the results were quite, yeah, maybe a little bit surprising as
How Weather Influences Music Preferences
00:18:59
Speaker
well. So maybe run us through that.
00:19:02
Speaker
Yeah, so to put this in context to try to kind of relate it with the first study is that in this first study, we look more at this focus on how much our musical behavior can be explained with innate factors like our genes.
00:19:24
Speaker
This second study is a completely different extreme where it asks these questions of how much of our musical behavior, in this case, music preferences, can be explained by very broad environmental factors, in this case, such as weather conditions. And this is maybe not so obvious at the beginning, but it makes sense when we think about music preferences because we know that
00:19:53
Speaker
to understand music success or popularity dynamics in the music industry, the music itself, it explains only a little bit of these dynamics. So what makes a good music famous or like a global hit, it's explained only partly based on the music itself. But there are all sorts of other factors that are not musical that will determine the success of this song.
00:20:23
Speaker
So of course, one factor could be the distribution network, like how much money do the artists have to pay to radio stations and audio streaming services and market their products. And there are many other factors, but one factor that has been ignored so far is this idea of our environment and these very broad conditions that happen in our environment, like the seasons,
00:20:48
Speaker
of the year or the weather. And I guess this was a bit the motivation of this study was, can we try to explain success in the music market based on something as simple as the weather conditions, in this case, in the UK, which is, I think, a very nice testing ground for the effect of weather because the weather here is kind of quite particular. Yeah, it's pretty
00:21:16
Speaker
The polite word would be variable I guess, right? So certainly there's a lot of different conditions under which music is listened to and there you go.
00:21:28
Speaker
Yeah. So to approach this question, in this case, I use the big data approach. So we don't use actually any participants here. But what we did is that we collected all the popular music that made it to the charts in the UK in the last 60 years. So that's a lot of music, I think. We had over 20,000 unique songs that made it to the top charts.
00:21:57
Speaker
And then we get all of this music. And nowadays with all of these new technologies and machine learning techniques, we can extract music features that describe this music. So for example, for each song, we have a feature that tells us what's the emotion that this song might evoke. Is it happy or sad?
00:22:18
Speaker
We have another feature that will tell us information about the tempo. Is it fast or slow? Another feature that might tell us how danceable this song is. If you listen to a song, do you want to dance or not? So we can extract all of these features, and then we can just see whether these different features that describe the music change in some systematic ways over the years.
00:22:41
Speaker
based on weather. Do these features of the music change if there was a month that it was very rainy and miserable compared to a month where it was very sunny? Do we see these changes in the music that becomes popular during this month? And that's what we study with all of these songs. And we indeed find very clear associations of weather and particular sets of music. So to put it, to summarize it,
00:23:11
Speaker
To put it simple, really what we find is that features that reflect positive music, happy music, and upbeat music, and music that makes you want to dance and so on, are strongly associated with good weather conditions and negatively associated with rainy months.
00:23:39
Speaker
particularly interesting tidbits in this study for me, which was, I mean, one was that the association was particularly strong in like autumn and winter.
00:23:50
Speaker
And when you suddenly had a nice day in autumn and it's been like rainy all around and stuff, that's when the effect of the weather is most pronounced in terms of, oh, people suddenly reach for the more positive, uplifting, danceable, angelic tunes in those conditions. Whereas I guess if you've had like a month of sun, you get kind of used to it. So yeah.
00:24:18
Speaker
That was a really nice insight. This is a very good observation in that I agree that that's I think what makes this study interesting because to some extent you would expect that
00:24:32
Speaker
good weather correlates with a beat and music that makes you dance and bad weather with music that is sad and so on. But there is this nuance in the paper that I think is very interesting, I agree. And it seems that this contrast, basically there is this, what is the effect of weather in our behavior? So as you say, if it's been sunny,
00:24:55
Speaker
for a month, one day more of sun will have no impact. But if it's been rainy and then suddenly it's sunny, that day, we know it very well in the UK. I mean, I'm not from here, but that day that is sunny, everyone is happy, you force yourself to live
00:25:14
Speaker
you know, the room and go for a walk. And you can see it here when it's summer in the UK, there is such a big, big consequence in people's behavior. And if you compare this with Spain, where I'm from,
00:25:29
Speaker
actually people take good weather for granted there. So a sunny month in summer probably will not create this weather effect and behavior so much because you have this literally kind of almost every month through the year. So it's this contrast or this impact of weather and this extreme condition that I think seems to matter most. Yeah, my wife is Argentine and actually she recommended that
00:25:59
Speaker
We speak, actually, because she came across you, she's studying here at Edinburgh, where you came to give a talk recently, but that's a bad vibe. But she doesn't have many positive comments on the UK weather, and particularly not the Scottish weather. But one thing she does say is like,
00:26:18
Speaker
It is great, like as soon as you get a sunny day, everyone just goes crazy. Yeah, there's like none of that kind of habituation or taking for granted of good weather. I thought the other kind of nuance that I noticed was that while there's a kind of positive correlation with the nice weather and sort of
00:26:46
Speaker
happy tunes, for want of a better phrase. The opposite isn't exactly true. When you have a kind of really bad day, it's not that people go listening to Radiohead or something. There's just kind of the same mix of music there. And maybe that's just, I'm curious, like maybe that's a UK thing because the not great weather is the norm. So I don't know, maybe in Spain or something, when you get that rare
00:27:15
Speaker
bad weather, maybe it does have the other effect. It's a tricky one in that, of course, there are some important limitations in this study. So that's a correlational study. So it's very hard to really tell, well, you cannot really tell any causal effect here of underlying mechanisms. So all what we can do is to kind of speculate in different ways. But it's true that there is something quite interesting about this because
00:27:45
Speaker
As I said, not all combinations of features correlate with weather. We only find this correlation with these features that relate to energetic and positive music. Now, a different combination of features that reflect music that is sad and more relaxed and more acoustic. In this case, in this combination of features, we find no relationship whatsoever with weather. And this, I think it's...
00:28:12
Speaker
within this speculative world, it's quite interesting because I think it says something about when do our preferences, affective preferences, when they may be influenced by external factors. So it could be that weather conditions is better at affecting music preferences that are positive, but actually negative
00:28:38
Speaker
effective preferences when we are sad or upset are way more influenced by individual personal factors, like if you broke up with your girlfriend or something happened in your life. So it could be that these choices of music based on negative or sad moments are way more based on these personal circumstances than these general external factors. That's one possible explanation for this finding, I think.
00:29:08
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, and again, it's a great illustration of what a creative academic or team academics can do with these platforms that are out there already and have so much data. There's just like great hunting grounds for
00:29:33
Speaker
association studies like this. Of course, we should say that we don't know that it isn't the weather that's affected by the popular music. I mean, that's kind of sci fi. But, you know, who knows, maybe the correlation, maybe the causal effect is the other way around. Well, that's
00:29:51
Speaker
one thing, but then the other thing that people are not aware a lot when they do big data studies is this role of algorithmic confounds, or in the case of the music industry, commercial gatekeepers. So I'm doing a lot of work now with
00:30:13
Speaker
with big data of music from Shazam and Spotify, and you can use this to study how music spreads across the world and so on. But there is always this problem of, is this people who are making these choices or is this little algorithm who's telling you to listen to that because it's sunny?
00:30:35
Speaker
industry gatekeepers who like promote different songs in different times of the year or in different places in the world based on commercial factors. So there is a trade off of, you know, controlled behavioral experiments in the lab versus big data in that in the big data space, we don't have, it's always, we will never be able to know how much of that it's real behavior versus algorithms.
00:31:03
Speaker
Yeah, that is a wonderful point and presumably something that's going to become
00:31:08
Speaker
more and more pronounced. Even work like this will influence those gatekeepers. And they'll think, OK, well, maybe there's some objective reality to people preferring energetic tracks when the weather's good. And they might actually, even if this wasn't in the algorithms previously, this sort of work could actually influence what we end up listening to. Yeah.
00:31:37
Speaker
I want to talk about one more thing before we move on to language evolution, which was, yeah, again, a very different study, but on the same themes of what makes us, what influences our consumption of music or our appreciation of music, perhaps. And it dates back to this really interesting
00:32:03
Speaker
event on a radio station in Germany in the 70s, I think, which is how you introduce your paper on the topic, where they played the same symphony three times, and in fact the same, the same, exactly the same excerpt of the same symphony, so precisely the same piece of music, you know, same recording, and so on. They played it three times, but saying that it was
00:32:31
Speaker
performed by three different composers, at least, and presumably orchestras. And they got hundreds of calls afterwards, with most people saying, oh yeah, those were indeed different pieces of music, and I had my preferences, and so on.
00:32:51
Speaker
This really pulled the wool over people's eyes. Just telling them that they were listening to different pieces of music seemed to make them believe that they were listening to different pieces of music, even though the evidence coming over their ways was that, no, it was exactly the same. Obviously, that wasn't a particularly scientific experiment. But then you repeated this in a much more controlled manner.
00:33:20
Speaker
and kind of managed to substantiate those results. And again, there's lots of interesting nuances that came out. So yeah, what got you interested in this effect and take us through this study?
Contextual Influences on Music Perception
00:33:34
Speaker
Yeah, I love that you mentioned this study because now it feels like
00:33:39
Speaker
Well, some years passed since then, but this is like the first study. This is the study that I guess helped me decide to pursue a career in music, cognition and music psychology. And this was actually during my master's at Goldsmiths.
00:33:56
Speaker
where I'm working now as a lecturer. So I came, you know, come back full, full cycle. Now I'm working as a lecturer here in psychology. But during my master's, I worked with Professor Daniel Mullensiefen, who is from Germany, and he came across this study, and we kind of discussed it in one of our meetings. And I was so fascinated by this phenomenon. I couldn't believe that that was true, because when you explain it, everyone will tell you no way if it's me,
00:34:26
Speaker
I will be able to tell you that it's the same song. So we just designed this experiment in very controlled settings in the lab where people were tested in cubicles with very good audio conditions and professional headphones. And then we used two different conditions, but one of them was actually a very familiar song. That's Jailhouse Road by Elvis Presley.
00:34:51
Speaker
You can hear the audience clapping. It has so many distinctive features to identify that is the same recording. And in this condition, which is the one that you would expect that most people would be able to tell that is the same, we created different fake contextual texts that provided different information about the Elvis impersonator. And this information was manipulated
00:35:16
Speaker
so it evoked different prestige. So in one condition that was Tommy something who's like an amateur impersonator of Elvis who has not been doing very well in his career and then you read this information and then you listen to the original recording of Gerhard Roch and then you evaluate it in many different ways.
00:35:39
Speaker
After this, you are told that someone else, you're going to listen to another performance from the same composition of Jailhouse Rock. But in this case, we have this very prestigious impersonator who work in Las Vegas and is very good and makes lots of money doing this. And then you listen to the exact identical same recording and evaluate it in the same way.
00:36:02
Speaker
And in this study, what we find is at the end, 75% of the participants believe that they have heard different musical pieces. But not only that, but also they provide very different variable
00:36:22
Speaker
experiences of this music. So some participants would say things like, oh, I like this piece much more than the other one because the tempo was faster or the band was more bonded and played more together or the voice was
00:36:38
Speaker
you know better voice and so on. So people do come up with these very good explanations of one condition over the other even though the actual stimulus itself is exactly the same. So I think this is a very interesting phenomenon to think about beauty and music in that coming back to what we said before a little bit is that
00:37:06
Speaker
I think the object itself is only part of the overall story to understand why music moves us or why we find music beautiful. There is all of these other factors that we need to think about, like the context, how prestigious we think the artist is, what is the aesthetic value of that situation and so on. Right, yeah. I think intuitively,
00:37:31
Speaker
makes sense and it's probably something that has been thought about a lot in other contexts like certainly with art you know people people will look at the price tag first and that gives them an idea of how you know how good it is um but yeah this is just so it is such a wonderful and yeah quite
00:37:55
Speaker
amusing study in some ways, basically like the fact that you used an Elvis track and and then it was live and it was actually Elvis playing right so this none of none of the recordings were from impersonators all the same and like you say yeah a live track so lots of things going on in the background that should give you know clues that
00:38:19
Speaker
you know, these are uncannily close. And yeah, I just love the fact that people, people kind of judge the, just these descriptions of the career of the impersonator has such a strong influence for so many people over their appreciation is just completely mind blowing. And yet in other ways, it really does fit in well with what has been seen in other areas of just how,
00:38:50
Speaker
how much we kind of price anchor ourselves or base area, you know, use various heuristics to make judgments. Yeah. Yeah. And there is this very interesting parallelism, as you say, with other aesthetic domains. So people have done very similar studies with wine, for example. And in the case, it's interesting because
00:39:18
Speaker
music and judge aesthetic judgments of music and wine in a way are all affected by the same psychological mechanism. So there are like these famous paper, for example, that put people in an fMRI in a brain scanner machine. And then they taste a bit of wine. And the only thing that changes is the price tag of of how much is this wine. And not only people, of course, like more the same wine when they think is more expensive, but also
00:39:48
Speaker
there are different areas in the brain that are being activated. So this difference in the price, it creates such a different firing of different parts of your brain as well. So of course, it is extremely relevant for marketing, people of advertising and all of these, because we know that these contextual framing effects can create such strong behavioral responses.
00:40:14
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, and it does suggest like that's particularly those fMRI experiments that it's not just that people are sort of lying about their experiences to try to make themselves, you know, feel more knowledgeable about wine or music right and not kind of make a mistake which
00:40:30
Speaker
you know, there is an extent to which that may be a confounding factor. But the fact that different, you know, the fMRI, if one equates regions with a brain with actual experiences, then, you know, it is quite strong evidence that people are actually having a different experience rather than just reporting the same experience differently. So, yeah.
00:40:54
Speaker
where my mind goes with this is I just wish there could be some sort of like, you know, buffer around everything I do so that it gets presented to me in the most positive light. So, you know, when my groceries arrive from Tesco or something, actually they come in a Waitrose van and in Waitrose bags or something. And I'm convinced that it's like from a better quality supermarket. Because yeah, I'm sure this stuff is real.
00:41:24
Speaker
you can improve your experience somehow for free if only you can sort of double blind yourself or blind yourself to the actual origins of things. Yeah, this is a very positive way of looking at this kind of study because in the past I thought more of the negative consequences, right? So what we did in this study, for example, as well is that we compared
00:41:51
Speaker
we studied participants with no musical expertise versus a group of very expert musicians, which might have an average of 10 years of formal training of playing instruments. So we were interested in seeing whether this effect is reduced in the expert musicians. And what we find is that expertise has, it doesn't protect you from this. So expert musicians with 10 years of experience are equally susceptible to this illusion
00:42:21
Speaker
than non musicians and then the negative interpretation of this is that of course this has lots of consequences for any serious objective examination procedure like when you want to make it into like music school or win like a music competition which is all assessed by human raters
00:42:43
Speaker
with lots of expertise, but nevertheless, music is like humans. So this kind of judgment is affected by all of these sorts of contextual factors, being that the prestige, but also your visual appearance, your gender, probably, and all of these different things that are not musical and should not matter. Yeah, I think this plays into a kind of more general question that I have, which is, to what extent does
00:43:14
Speaker
empirical aesthetics and these sort of studies like affect how much like to what extent are they kind of deflationary right in terms of sort of reducing that sense of of wonder in things versus actually in some cases maybe they can
00:43:37
Speaker
kind of be inspiring and like two non-musical thoughts that come to mind that kind of push in those different directions. One is prospect refuge theory, you know, this theory that
00:43:52
Speaker
purports to explain why we like the views from top of mountains and from, I don't know, from a glade in the woods out upon a lake, which is that evolutionarily, there are reasons to think that we like to have a large view, like a prospect, so we can detect predators, but we also like to have it from a kind of
00:44:16
Speaker
protected place, a kind of refuge. So top of the mountain is really good because you know things got to come up to get you and you can see for miles and miles around so you've got loads of warning for predators. And that's kind of deflationary because you know all these beautiful vistas and things if you just think of them in those times it's like oh well
00:44:38
Speaker
Would I really find this beautiful if it weren't for the fact that I'm really at root just concerned with not being eaten? But on the other hand, there are, so the other study that kind of points in the other way is there's a physicist, oh, I forgotten his name. Let me just, I'll look it up. Oh gosh, where did I put it?
00:45:04
Speaker
Richard Taylor, that's it, who's looked at fractal patterns in art and in nature. He's got this beautifully titled paper, which is something like The Residence Between Art and Nature.
00:45:23
Speaker
looks at the kind of the fractal dimension that you find, you know, commonly occurring in nature, obviously, you get different fractal dimensions depending on what you're looking at. But he kind of suggests that that in Jackson Pollock's art, which is also quite fractal. So if you look at those kind of paint splashes at different levels, there's a kind of scale free nature to them. And so yeah, that they have so you can characterize them with a fractal dimension. And that
00:45:51
Speaker
know, the suggestion is that we kind of have this appreciation of art because of kind of fractals in art because they kind of
00:46:01
Speaker
chime in with fractals in nature. And that, for me, just seems like a wonderful fact. That actually boosts my experience of Jackson Pollock. And one might make similar arguments about, I don't know, the golden ratio and how, you know, that something appears a lot of nature. And maybe it's, you know, and again, actually, you could have two takes on why the golden ratio is kind of visible so much, like the kind of deflationary take would just be, oh, the Greeks loved it and they just put it everywhere. But the more kind of interesting and kind of
00:46:29
Speaker
inducing of wonder version would be oh actually yeah this is something that really does occur very commonly in nature and when we see it in a painting it kind of reminds us of all these beautiful natural phenomena and yeah I yeah I'm curious as to yeah just whether
00:46:50
Speaker
like how the work that you've done kind of affects your appreciation of things in general. Do you find this sense of wonder or do you think, oh no, well, even if music experts can be duped as much as anyone, then what's the point of all this studying? Yeah, this is a wonderful question, I think, because I guess it does affect me because I think
00:47:21
Speaker
Okay, so for example, I study a lot music from a very physical point of view, like what is music in terms of this sound wave and what is speech, which is this frequencies of low and high and how this changes over time.
00:47:38
Speaker
As a researcher in music, you decompose music in these very artificial ways. And then if you think about it, if you do this kind of thing, you can think about music as just this sound that is organized in different ways.
00:47:57
Speaker
And the building blocks are finite. You have like notes or frequencies and scales or melodies that you can put them in different ways. But the possible combinations of all of these building blocks is completely endless.
00:48:15
Speaker
Now, if you think about it in this way, it's very fascinating because the question is like, how is it possible that some combinations move us so much that make us cry or laugh or dance all night long, whereas other combinations completely, we hate them, or they don't tell
00:48:36
Speaker
they were completely neutral to them. And I think that relates to the examples that you were putting with the same history with visual art. And I think that when you do research on these aspects, there is some kind of beauty at this paradox of like when you decompose it, it kind of
00:48:57
Speaker
it makes no sense. How is it possible? But then actually, when you put it together, some of these combinations work out for different reasons very well, and evoke these very strong sensations. And there is something very beautiful, I think, in this process, from the building blocks to the emotion. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And I think certainly, I mean, just
00:49:22
Speaker
just understanding all of the things that influence one's appreciation of music. In a sense, there is something wondrous about that in knowing just how complex like our own feelings towards music are. And yeah, I think, again, moving away from this thing, moving away from the idea that beauty is just something that's objective and not based on the circumstances.
00:49:52
Speaker
doesn't mean that we have to abandon the idea of beauty being beautiful and wondrous. It's just much more complicated in a sense. So I do want to talk about, and we've talked a lot about a lot of interesting things, but I'm really excited to talk about your work on music evolution.
Cultural Transmission and Music Evolution
00:50:11
Speaker
We've talked previously on this podcast about language evolution and how
00:50:17
Speaker
out of a kind of structuralist soup. Researchers have shown that grammars evolve through a really cunning set of experiments. And I'll kind of refer listeners to the previous episode with Simon and Kirby if they've not come across it. But
00:50:38
Speaker
Yeah, you've worked on very similar things with music and showing how the structure in music seems to evolve over generations. This is probably sounding very abstract to people who've not listened to the previous episode. So maybe you can, yeah, give a bit more detail on how these experiments work and what... Yes. So I guess like a place to start is with this question of
00:51:08
Speaker
how do complex cultural systems evolve? And by cultural systems here, we can think about language and technology, which have been studied a lot, but also music or art. At the end of the day, music is this system that has been transmitted over generations of humans, from many generations over time.
00:51:34
Speaker
this has been changing in systematic ways and evolving over time. So the music that we listen to today, but also the music in different cultures, it can only be understood as this product of cumulative cultural transmission. This is a very interesting way to think about music because
00:51:59
Speaker
I guess it puts the focus on this transmission process. So if we want to understand why music is the way it is and why do we like the music, why does this song evokes this very strong pleasure on me and not that one, to address these kind of questions, we need to think about this underlying evolutionary process.
00:52:21
Speaker
So I got, I've become very interested in these questions. And in part, again, that's from my postdoc with Norija Kobe, who was one of the first researchers to take this pioneering work from Simon Kirby in language evolution and think, can we apply the same methods to study the evolution of
00:52:44
Speaker
music. So this kind of work, it all started with this, okay, language and music are similar, but also they are different. Would kind of the same process also shape the evolution of music and this kind of experimental paradigms help us understand how music evolves. So the idea of all of this work is to use these simulated cultural evolution experiments in the lab
00:53:08
Speaker
where people create music and you pass this music from person to person, like in the telephone game, to kind of simulate these processes of evolution with music, with rhythms or with melodies and people sing these melodies and pass it to each other. And then we can study how different features and different structures emerge for this simple act of transmission, like hearing a melody and singing this melody and pass it to the next person.
00:53:38
Speaker
So, yeah, if I can kind of read that back and make sure that I've got it and listeners have got it. So, for example, with a rhythm example, you would kind of generate, you start out with a lot of kind of almost random or random rhythm rhythms, indeed, like a few taps each, and
00:54:04
Speaker
you play one of those random rhythms to a listener and they have to tap it back. You record their response and kind of synthesize it. So I guess it sounds, you know, it's the same sort of taps as previously, but now the rhythm itself is matched to how they tapped. And then you take that rhythm, you play it to
00:54:30
Speaker
a second person who didn't hear the very first random one that you had, and they listen to it, they tap it out, record it, play it on, and you do this many times, and it goes down generations, and as people listen to it, they make mistakes when they're tapping it out, and those mistakes, well, some of them get passed on, some of them don't,
00:54:54
Speaker
And you not only do this sort of in one chain, but you have many, many different chains. So you can really drill into what happens for a large different set of random rhythms. Do they converge over generations on
00:55:12
Speaker
to something similar or do they stay more or less the same? So that's the kind of idea of the telephone game, I guess, where you ring someone up, you whisper something to them. We also call it Chinese whispers, I guess. And then they ring someone else up, they say that they pass the message on. And over time, those things tend to get distorted.
00:55:39
Speaker
Yeah, so I guess is that the bones of kind of functionally how these things work? Yes. So this, that's an experimental paradigm, I guess, but also a framework in that this kind of artificial process that you describe
00:55:56
Speaker
It turns out to be very similar, even though a very simplistic version of it, but very similar to how culture evolved. So you are born today and you are exposed to many cultural artifacts and products that have been generated by your previous generation and then you
00:56:17
Speaker
are exposed to these, and then you modify these in different ways, you create new things, and all of these new creations will be passed on to the next generation. So, of course, this happens in large timescales, but we can simulate this with this behavioral experiment in the lab,
00:56:36
Speaker
And it works quite efficiently, like the work of Simon Kirby with language, but people have done it across all sorts of domains with drawings, narratives. And it also works, of course, in the case of music. And critical to this is what you mentioned, which is that cultural transmission, so this transmission of information from person to person, is not perfect.
00:57:03
Speaker
Right, so people always introduce systematic errors.
00:57:09
Speaker
So, okay, naively, someone could think like, okay, we are just machines who copy and pass this to the next person and we are very good at it. So in this scenario, you would find no cultural evolution or no cultural change because we would be transmitting exactly the same things. But in reality, of course, we are humans. We have cognitive limitations, production limitations. So we introduce all sorts of systematic errors
00:57:37
Speaker
in our productions to the next generations. And that's one case, but also there's the case of aesthetic creativity. Some people want to actually create something new.
00:57:48
Speaker
as well. So sometimes this systematic variation is accidental. Other times, it's actually voluntary. Someone wants to create a new mega-heat. But no matter which type of thing is, there is this addition of variation that is systematic, this guided variation, which over time, we introduce these errors that are systematic. And over time, what happens is that this transmitted
00:58:18
Speaker
products, in this case musical language, end up converging towards our individual cognitive biases. So limits in our memory or in our perception will shape from person to person, from generation to generation, the kind of cultural systems that can evolve and can be transmitted. Yeah, it's interesting. What strikes me as a slight difference with the
00:58:47
Speaker
kind of explanation for how this works in language evolution versus musical evolution is, I think you're right, in your musical evolution experiments, the errors seem to be systematic rather than random, because the sort of rhythms are so small that you have, they're just like three taps, I think.
00:59:16
Speaker
So there's, it would take a long time if the errors were purely random and the, let me put it like this. On the language evolution experiments, like the kind of alternative explanation is something like, well, the errors that people introduce when they're copying something are
00:59:46
Speaker
fairly random, but the next generation will be more likely to pass on the features that sort of map onto a kind of emerging grammar, if you like. So if there are two words that get passed on that describe similar things, and it just so happens that by random
01:00:15
Speaker
mishearing, one person at one generation gives those two words a kind of similar sound. Well, the next generation is kind of more likely to pass on that inherited error, if you like, because the two words are kind of similar. And so the fact that they're saying similar kind of makes sense. But I can't really think of a way of explaining the way that it works in your kind of rhythm experiments, for example, except in terms of actually people
01:00:45
Speaker
When they hear something, they kind of want to make it move towards, I mean, maybe just make it more concrete. When they hear one of these random rhythms, they kind of end up evolving towards having integer ratio, inter-ratio durations, if you like. So there might be like, you know, two beats or two, I don't know, one second between two notes and then half a second till the next one, something like that.
01:01:17
Speaker
And yeah, I can't really think of a way of explaining that other than people really kind of want to move them towards those kind of notches. Yeah. Yeah, I guess the exact alignment between these language evolution and music evolution is a bit complicated because it depends on
01:01:40
Speaker
some experimental features and decisions, I guess. But I think there is some extent of overlap in that, for example, many of these results that we find, for example, are constrained by our learning biases. And one learning bias that is very important is memory.
01:02:03
Speaker
Yeah. So the reason that people over time in language will tend to combine chunks of information, for example, it's to some extent related caused by memory, right? Because you have limited memory. So it's good to use compositionality or things like this because it's like efficient in terms of memory. The same also happens with music. So I think that the realm of musical melodies, which is
01:02:34
Speaker
Yeah, like rhythms is something I've been working most recently, is that melodies are these long sequences of tones. So when you start with a random sequence of tones, it's very difficult to remember it and to process it and represent it and then sing it.
01:02:52
Speaker
So we also use chunking or different things that help our memory to process this melody so then we can sing them back. So one way of doing this is by using rhythm. Rhythm is just like an efficient way of putting tones together so we can kind of cluster it and remember it more efficiently.
01:03:14
Speaker
Another way in which we do this is by using pitch intervals, like the difference between two notes, using pitch intervals that are familiar or that sound very good to us. So an octave or a perfect fifth. We can remember this very well because it gives us a sense of stability and consonance. And again, this is
01:03:35
Speaker
we will see the emergence of these kind of intervals because we can remember them very well and they help us organize melodies around them. So here we are just kind of the root of these systematic variations is always potentially some sort of limits on memory.
01:03:54
Speaker
But we see these different kind of effects, but probably all kind of explain to some extent for memory biases. And I like to think about this world, for example, imagine like a machine or like a human that had like three times more memory capacity than we do.
01:04:16
Speaker
In this scenario, musical systems and language systems would be very different than the music and the language that we see cross-culturally today.
01:04:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a fascinating point. And in some ways, it's a feature and not a bug that we are finite. Otherwise, we might not have evolved this common system for these incredible symbolic systems, which need to be very efficient in that they have a limited number of symbols. But those symbols can be combined in
01:04:55
Speaker
in a definite number of ways. And yeah, one of the kind of, yeah, most striking things from language experiments and from this is just, yeah, that is so related to the fact, I mean, it just really depends on the fact that we need to kind of compress the information down somehow.
01:05:17
Speaker
But if we didn't have that constraint, it's not clear that there would be any kind of convergence on a system with a grammar, which are the most kind of expressive systems. There is something very interesting that you mentioned this, and I think that's... I'm not sure we know yet an answer, but...
01:05:42
Speaker
There is like some important differences between language evolution and music evolution.
01:05:48
Speaker
So one of them is the way in the kind of evolutionary goal, right? So language has to be efficient to communicate linguistic information, like information that could depend on your survival, right? So in a way, you want to be very efficient. You want to be able to communicate effectively using the minimum number possible of combinations.
01:06:14
Speaker
In music, the goal is different. Music is mostly used for expressive communication or social situations that aren't so much about communication specifically, communicating an idea specifically. We use it for socially bonding. So we want some units of rhythm that allows us to coordinate at the same time. We use it for parent to infant communication.
01:06:38
Speaker
to kind of play and communicate with their kids. So you need some sort of like pitch contours to be effective in this communication. And I guess what I'm saying here is that,
01:06:49
Speaker
These different goals for evolution, I think, also are very important to understand why there are differences in these two communication systems. So with music, the goal is not always to be super efficient in terms of information units, but sometimes it's actually being expressive, which is the opposite. It's like, how can I be very creative with these building blocks and these information units in a way that people can still understand me
01:07:18
Speaker
but potentially it's not always very efficient right if you think about the art like the art example that you mentioned or like some complex music you know it doesn't obey the same rules than language for example and that's I think what makes these comparisons very interesting and to finish about this is that if you think about
01:07:42
Speaker
vocal transmission like speech and language and language. This is really interesting because both systems come from the same physical system about a vocal system. This coordinated use of this apparatus creates speech and creates song.
01:08:01
Speaker
And even though everything comes from the same physical system, these two systems, speech for language and song for music, are very different in terms of their structures. So it's very interesting how everything from the same instrument can actually produce these very different communication systems, potentially due to the goal in which they make them evolve, I guess. Yeah. I'm going to throw out one of my favorite quotes here, which is,
01:08:31
Speaker
like poetry and integral, lower limit speech, upper limit music, which is Louis Zukowski. And there is this kind of space in the middle where they meet, which according to Zukowski is poetry, but I think even, you know, you could say it's rap as well. It's, you know, there's a real musicality to, or can be a real musicality to the way that language is used. Yeah, so, yeah, it's a wonderful,
01:08:58
Speaker
thought. Maybe another kind of intriguing difference between the language evolution and the music evolution is language evolution seems to end up producing lots of different organisms or languages, as it were. And that's just obvious because, you know,
01:09:19
Speaker
you know, natively we speak different languages and there's hundreds of different languages spoken around the world. But even in the labs, like different iterations of the very same experiment, which start with the same stimuli, you know, different chains of recipients will end up converging on different languages and grammars.
01:09:45
Speaker
even if some of those kind of structural features are similar, like they will just sound different, they will look different. And to an extent, that's true with music in that we, you know, there are different kind of musical preferences, and this is something that you've looked at in your work. But in another way, there's a lot of similarity in terms of, again,
01:10:10
Speaker
for rhythms, there is a kind of preference for integer ratios. The exact ratios really intriguingly do change between different cultures. But it just strikes me that there's a bit more kind of commonality there, maybe. But perhaps that's, I mean,
01:10:32
Speaker
I suppose it's quite hard to measure because obviously there's a lot of commonality between languages, even if they sound different, you know, we all use verbs and adjectives and so on. So maybe I'm drawing more of a disanalogy than actually exists. It's very hard to compare the two very different systems.
01:10:49
Speaker
Yeah, I wouldn't dare to make that comparison, whether there is more cross
Cross-Cultural Rhythms and Musical Structures
01:10:56
Speaker
-cultural similarities or differences in language versus music, because it's a very fascinating question, but a kind of complex one. But about music, which is what I know,
01:11:07
Speaker
You are right that there is a lot of cross-cultural similarities or people call them universals, right? So all musical systems across cultures use repetition and use different scales that consist of stable pitches and isochronal rhythms and so on. However,
01:11:28
Speaker
Actually, I think there is also an incredible amount of diversity and availability in musical systems. So even though everything is based with the same kind of universal rules or building blocks, the combinations that make up different musical traditions are so huge that if you were to listen to some
01:11:49
Speaker
traditional North Indian music, for example, we would struggle to understand it, like it would be a little bit like listening to Chinese. And you really need this exposure to understand the rules and the musical dramas to really make sense of that music. And you don't even have to go across a different musical culture, you can just think about musical styles, like many people have experienced
01:12:17
Speaker
probably the situation of trying to listen to classical music and being frustrated because...
01:12:22
Speaker
You don't like it. And I think classical music in a way is like learning a language. You need to do this effort of like listening to it and someone has to explain you a little bit of the structures. And then over time you start understanding different beats and potentially at some point you will really understand it and really enjoy it. But it does require getting familiar with the rules and the vocabulary and so on.
01:12:50
Speaker
Yeah, that's a beautiful thought. And yeah, it was so, one thing I really enjoyed from your rhythm experiment was just how clear some of the kind of variations were in terms of if you run one of these kind of telephone game type experiments, people converge on quite
01:13:15
Speaker
You know, there are similarities. So there's this kind of integer ratio thing, which, actually, I do find the integer ratio really fascinating. Just the fact that it's an integer is not obvious why it should be that we chunk things that way like we don't, you know, going back to the golden ratio, right.
01:13:32
Speaker
That is not an integer ratio. That's an irrational number, right? Like phi. Or another common shape that we see in nature is circles. And again, that's pi, which defines important properties of circles. That's not an integer ratio either. So visually, a lot of
01:13:58
Speaker
aesthetics is kind of explained in terms of irrational numbers. So I do find it just amazing actually that musically there is this kind of appearance of integers.
01:14:11
Speaker
But yeah, by going back to my original thread. Yeah, so for example, like Candonbe musicians from Uruguay have quite distinctive rhythms and anyone who's listened to Candonbe will kind of recognize that. And when they play this repeated game quite quickly, you know, I think it's like just maybe seven or so iterations, they tend to converge on particular
01:14:39
Speaker
So they might converge on a much simpler rhythm as well, but they're much more likely to converge on a kind of a rhythm then, then, say, a North American or even a Uruguayan, so kind of always being a neuro guy.
01:14:57
Speaker
Uruguayan student who has lots of international exposure, which, yeah, speaks to just how complex cultural studies are, because you can't just pick someone from Uruguay and expect them to like Candombe or kind of really, you know, have an affinity to those rhythms. Yeah. Yeah. So I think you are referring to this recent paper led by Norija Kobe, who
01:15:25
Speaker
is who designed, I think, this iterated learning experiment with tapping. And I think this paper that I've been involved in is a very beautiful
01:15:39
Speaker
insane kind of massive piece of research in that Nori put together this team of I think over 30 researchers from around the world. And they are all given the same setup to collect data using these telephone games with rhythms. And this is really the only way to tackle these questions of nature and nurture that we started our interview with because this allows, well, what he finds in this study
01:16:08
Speaker
is that, yeah, there is these two extremes, like on the one hand you see these cross-cultural similarities, like rhythm, people produce rhythms that are strongly biased towards these integral ratios, simple rhythmic categories, and these we see cross-culturally.
01:16:29
Speaker
However, we also see at the same time a lot of cross-cultural variation. That depends on what you've been exposed to. And I think the Uruguayan drama is like a great example, but also we also see it very clearly in Europe.
01:16:48
Speaker
where you have people in France and then very close by in the volcanic area with Greece or Turkish traditional music, which in a way is very similar, but actually it uses more complex ratios. And you can already see people that are very close by, but exhibit this rhythmic variation. And of course, this is due to lifetime differences in this exposure to rhythm.
01:17:18
Speaker
we come back again to these like these always to understand the complexity of musical behavior is this interaction between biology and exposure and cultural exposure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then of course, yeah, you've done something, you've led a similar project, but for singing, which I guess involves
01:17:42
Speaker
you know, it looks more at the melodic features where there's even more things in some ways going on than rhythm.
01:17:53
Speaker
And again, I mean, to summarize very briefly a really fascinating study, you see these convergences that there are sort of common ratios between the frequencies or common sort of minimum frequencies, I suppose. But again, there is a difference, like there are kind of smaller variations in Indian music, if I'm correct.
01:18:22
Speaker
But then there seems to be some kind of universal preferences for kind of arcs if I or like where there is a kind of rising and falling in the sets of notes. One thing that a couple of features that really stood out for me from that study
01:18:44
Speaker
One was that things changed quite a lot where instead of getting people to sing after they sing back the notes that they'd heard and using that as the means of transition, if you got them to kind of use a slider, it really
01:19:04
Speaker
Yeah, it changed the features. So using the slider, they were less reliant on or sort of less drawn to a smaller vocal range, I guess. And so the intervals between notes tended to be larger. But people also tended to be a little bit less accurate, which is kind of interesting because you'd think maybe that actually it should be easier to have larger intervals between things if we weren't constrained by
01:19:34
Speaker
vocal chords, but perhaps our kind of physiology is so attuned to the sort of vocal range that we typically use that maybe we're just really, really sensitive there. And the other thing, and this is similar to, again, the work in linguistic evolution, is just that you don't see this emergence of
01:19:58
Speaker
Let me say this differently. If instead of having a cultural transmission chain of notes being passed from person to person, someone is just over and over like passing something to themselves and kind of playing back the notes, then you don't have this same emergence of a or convergence on particular notes. But people do kind of recall quite well the precise notes they have.
01:20:27
Speaker
that they come up with their own kind of individual system that allows them to memorize what the notes were. But they don't end up converging on kind of music as we know, I suppose. Yes, this is, I think, the power of this kind of experiment in that because we can simulate or recreate this cultural transmission process in the lab.
01:20:55
Speaker
We can then study for the first time the casual role of underlying mechanisms.
Physical Constraints in Musical System Evolution
01:21:02
Speaker
So this is very powerful because normally these mechanisms, you know, the role of production or the role of transmission
01:21:09
Speaker
We know that are important, but they're impossible to study because they are hidden or just not accessible from available data. So doing this in the lab allows us to manipulate different aspects and try to say, OK, how much does it matter for production if I sync versus if I produce music with an slider?
01:21:31
Speaker
or how much does it matter the transmission process if I transmit from person to person or I transmit only music and myself. So we can run these studies and that's why what I did in this paper is that we do different manipulations to tease apart the role of individual mechanisms. And we find that some of these mechanisms are very important. So in the case of production,
01:21:58
Speaker
I was very surprised in that many of the features that we see in real music across the world can be just explained by production constraints, by the limits of our vocal system. So as I'm speaking to you, I'm breathing in air and I have limited
01:22:18
Speaker
air capacity in my lungs. So at some point, I don't have more air and I have to start like going down in pitch or in contour because I don't have enough energy. And this limit, physical limit from based on our vocal system, it does explain a lot of the features that we see in music. So a very obvious one that we see in our experiments is how large the pitch intervals are.
01:22:47
Speaker
So of course, I can sing an octave, which is 12 semitones. And I'm going to really have to force this, but I'm not going to be able to sing anything larger than an octave myself. So this will really limit the kind of music that we can make, right? So in this experiment where we repeat these transmission experiments, but people match melodies with the sliders.
01:23:08
Speaker
suddenly we see that the musical systems that evolve are much different in this feature. So the average pitch interval is much larger because you can produce it. So this is just one, you know, teasing apart this role of production, for example. Yeah, it comes back to that fascinating idea of
01:23:30
Speaker
the extent to which just our physical constraints, whether they're memory or, you know, perceptual, or the ability to reproduce certain things, just how much that defines the space, the aesthetic space, I guess. You know, we do tend to think of
01:23:54
Speaker
music, art, et cetera, is these otherworldly things that somehow detach from our physical incarnate existence. But actually, you know, the formats that they take are so related. I mean, they're completely dependent on, yeah, the contingent facts of our material makeup, I suppose. Yeah. And then there is these
01:24:23
Speaker
I guess one of the most amazing questions that you can ask, but also one of the most difficult or impossible to address, which is these what people call sometimes this music musicality co-evolution or like Gene's cultural evolution, which is that, of course, our musicality, our musical abilities and cognitive
01:24:50
Speaker
abilities will shape the kind of music that we can make. So the music that exists today is really determined by our musicality. But at the same time, the music that we can make will shape our biology or our ability over time and to understand
01:25:10
Speaker
why music is the way it is, we don't need to think about this kind of core evolution of musical ability and exposure to actual music in the world. And I think this is really the way to kind of address the complexities of music evolution, but of course are very hard to study empirically. But there are very interesting things when you think about this, because for example, some people
01:25:40
Speaker
think that some of our aesthetic preferences for different music intervals might just come from the way in which different when you make music with an instrument for example you can just there's a certain combinations of music that you can make
01:26:03
Speaker
and certain frequencies that will resonate and because that's how you would do music at the early early first early humans for example will be singing or will be hitting different like kind of drums and so on it could be that this kind of physical
01:26:23
Speaker
the resonances that you could make at that point with these instruments could shape the kind of aesthetic preferences that we have now. So we have this preference for like consonant intervals based on the kind of frequencies that these instruments could make years, years ago, and of course one of these instruments is our own voice, which also resonates on certain frequencies.
01:26:51
Speaker
So there is this very complicated co-evolution system here that is very important to try to address these questions. Yeah, I guess the kind of corollary of that is that, I don't know, the Moog synthesizer maybe in some thousands of generations time will have had some effect on the appreciation of music down the line. Totally, yeah. And I guess one thing we should say is that, you know,
01:27:21
Speaker
even if one wants to be very deflationary about this and say, oh, well, the landscape of music is completely defined by physical nature and there's an evolutionary aspect to that and so forth, it doesn't mean that there's not just kind of infinite ways that we can play in that landscape. So in some ways, it just makes it
01:27:51
Speaker
I think it's very interesting to understand what defines that landscape, but we'll never answer the kind of
01:27:58
Speaker
eternal questions, I guess, of within that, like, what is it that makes one particular phrasing or one particular piece of music particularly beautiful? We might get some clues, I guess, as to why, you know, it comes with the form of notes that it does and perhaps even why we like arched contours, maybe there's some kind of
01:28:23
Speaker
easy way of understanding that. But I feel that music is always trying to, like all of art, it's always trying to play with itself and kind of usurp its limits in a way and do something slightly unexpected within the format that it inherits. Yeah. And I guess that's one of the reasons that music is such a special thing to study. And from a scientific point of view, I think is such a puzzling
01:28:54
Speaker
behavior, you know, it's so universal and widespread. So people spend so much time in it and resources. So in theory, there should be some sort of obvious value for for for it to survive and evolve. But on the other hand, it's not clear at all. And people disagree of why music exists at all. What is the actual the actual value? And I think the only thing that we can do as scientists is to kind of
01:29:23
Speaker
pick our battles and then there's like some levels of analysis in which I think we can definitely get very good answers. So in terms of why is music pleasurable, from a neuroscience point of view, I think we are very close to understand how all of this works. But from another level of analysis, which would be evolutionary psychology,
01:29:45
Speaker
then it's much harder story, right? Like why does music, what are the origins of music and why did music evolve in the first place? This kind of level of analysis, some question I don't think we will ever be able to completely solve. Yeah.
01:30:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's a super exciting time. And I mean, just looking back at the conversation, one gets a flavor of just all the possibilities for study out there. You know, all these big data sets that are going around the genomics information, just the sheer volume of things to look at. It must, I don't know, does it seem daunting sometimes? Or are you just excited about the field? No, I think it's exciting. And I think
01:30:35
Speaker
Right now it's particularly exciting because
01:30:39
Speaker
with the advent of technology and mobile devices and all of these social media platforms and stuff, combined with all the computational techniques that we have now. We have algorithms that can very accurately represent music and generate music and make sense of all of these complexities of these systems. I think that's very exciting for us for the science of music and aesthetics.
01:31:05
Speaker
to try to address this question with a lot of data, but also very powerful computational and behavioral techniques. Brilliant. Yeah. Yeah, I think this is a great place. We're both here in the UK and getting late. I don't know if you have any final thoughts, but this has just been such a fascinating conversation.
01:31:27
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think that it's been great and lots of fun to talk about all of this trajectory of all of these different approaches on music research. So I think I'm very happy with this. Brilliant. Thanks so much, Manuel.
01:31:44
Speaker
So as promised, here is a brief audio appendix. So the first file I'm going to play is an excerpt from Jailhouse Rock, the same version that was used in the experiment with repeated songs or repeated pieces of music.
01:32:29
Speaker
So the actual piece that they played is longer than that, but I'm not gonna risk the YouTube and Spotify algorithms flagging me for playing for them copyrighted content. So I'm just gonna leave you with that a little bit. But I think you can see just how many features there are just in that small piece that should distinguish this from other performances or should make it clear that it is the same performance where you listen to it several times.
01:32:57
Speaker
The next piece I'm going to play is, let me see, here are some random initial seeds of three tones. So this is used in the singing experiment.
01:33:29
Speaker
It's kind of tricky, trippy. I quite like it. And now let's listen to one of the transmission chain. So those are five different random C's that would have started five different transmission chains. Now let's listen to an example of one transmission chain. Ta, ta, ta.
01:33:59
Speaker
Ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta
01:34:28
Speaker
Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta Ta
01:34:57
Speaker
And finally, I'm going to play a little bit of another transmission chain where you can hear an arched melody developing.
01:35:44
Speaker
Now, not to be unkind about any of those participants, but I'd say they have about a similar, well, some of them have a similar level of musical ability to myself, which is not huge, but it is incredible how
01:35:57
Speaker
very clearly a particular pattern does emerge. So it starts off very flat and then does develop this arched contour. Anyway, if you're enjoying these podcasts, please do subscribe, hit the like button, rates, I don't know, whatever platform you're using, do take the appropriate actions to spread the words. And until next time, this has been fun.
01:36:39
Speaker
Bye!