Cultural and biological evolution of musical diversity

Patrick Savage

Comp Music Lab, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University SFC

Evolutionary approaches to music have tended to focus on universal aspects of music and their potential biological bases and functions. But music also evolves through cultural evolution, which can give rise to the diversity of musical forms found throughout the world. Biological and cultural evolution can also interact to create gene-culture evolutionary feedback loops and shape regularities across diverse musical systems. I will discuss studies that unite these biological and cultural evolutionary approaches to cross-cultural musical diversity and discuss potential areas of future work (including music-language and human-animal song comparisons).