共同研究・競争的資金等の研究課題

Music is a human universal, but there remains little data on cross-cultural musical variation. We will perform a series of experiments investigating global diversity in perception and production of musical 1) rhythm, 2) melody, 3) harmony, 4) language, 5) creativity, and 6) cooperation. In total we will conduct experiments with thousands of musicians and non-musicians from over a dozen countries around the world. Our findings will have implications for understanding the evolution of music and its place in society, including for composers, instrument manufacturers, copyright legislators, etc.

There is little cross-cultural data on the degree of variation in musical production and perception with which to understand the evolution of music. I propose to address this problem through a combination of 1) automated acoustic analysis of ~300 recordings of music, speech, and bird song recordings, and 2) perceptual experiments on ~300 participants from Japan and the USA. By synthesizing global data on pitch production and perception, I aim to shed new light on the way biology and culture combine to create human music, with important practical implications for the music industry.