ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Evolution of music by public choice.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Decoding the evolution of melodic and harmonic structure of Western music through the lens of network science.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Foundations of Ecological and Evolutionary Change.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Mechanisms of cultural diversity in urban populations.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The cultural evolution of distortion in music (and other norms of mixed appeal).Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Exploring correlations in genetic and cultural variation across language families in northeast Asia.Science advances · 2021Article
- From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to "Cumulative Cultural Evolution?"Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- Selection, adaptation, inheritance and design in human culture: the view from the Price equation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The pace of modern culture.Nature human behaviour · 2020Article
- Statistical Evolutionary Laws in Music Styles.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Conformity bias in the cultural transmission of music sampling traditions.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- Music Evolution in the Laboratory: Cultural Transmission Meets Neurophysiology.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2018Review
- Interactive music composition driven by feature evolution.SpringerPlus · 2016Article
- The evolution of popular music: USA 1960-2010.Royal Society open science · 2015Article
- Bach Is the Father of Harmony: Revealed by a 1/f Fluctuation Analysis across Musical Genres.PloS one · 2015Article
- The same, only different: what can responses to music in autism tell us about the nature of musical emotions?Frontiers in psychology · 2013Article
- Animal signals and emotion in music: coordinating affect across groups.Frontiers in psychology · 2013Article
- Effect of psychological bias separates cultural from biological evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2012Article
- Adaptive walks on the fitness landscape of music.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2012Article
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4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Music evolves as composers, performers, and consumers favor some musical variants over others. To investigate the role of consumer selection, we constructed a Darwinian music engine consisting of a population of short audio loops that sexually reproduce and mutate. This population evolved for 2,513 generations under the selective influence of 6,931 consumers who rated the loops' aesthetic qualities. We found that the loops quickly evolved into music attributable, in part, to the evolution of aesthetically pleasing chords and rhythms. Later, however, evolution slowed. Applying the Price equation, a general description of evolutionary processes, we found that this stasis was mostly attributable to a decrease in the fidelity of transmission. Our experiment shows how cultural dynamics can be explained in terms of competing evolutionary forces.
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