ArticlePloS one2016
The Evolution of Musical Diversity: The Key Role of Vertical Transmission.
Article in PloS one, 2016. 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.
- What did the dove sing to Pope Gregory? Ancestral melody reconstruction in Gregorian chant using Bayesian phylogenetics.PloS one · 2026Article
- Cultural evolution - of the arts.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Contrasting modes of cultural evolution: Kra-Dai languages and weaving technologies.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- African harps as units of cultural evolution: a cladistic analysis on their morphology.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Deep history of cultural and linguistic evolution among Central African hunter-gatherers.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Latent evolutionary signatures: a general framework for analysing music and cultural evolution.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Universality, domain-specificity, and development of psychological responses to music.Nature reviews psychology · 2023Article
- The (Co)Evolution of Language and Music Under Human Self-Domestication.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Article
- The Generalized Robinson-Foulds Distance for Phylogenetic Trees.Journal of computational biology : a journal of computational molecular cell biology · 2021Article
- The treeness of the tree of historical trees of life.PloS one · 2020Article
- Statistical Evolutionary Laws in Music Styles.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Article
- A simultaneous search for footprints of early human migration processes using the genetic and folk music data in Eurasia.Molecular genetics and genomics : MGG · 2019Article
- Music Evolution in the Laboratory: Cultural Transmission Meets Neurophysiology.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2018Review
- Music and the Meeting of Human Minds.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Review
- A computational study on outliers in world music.PloS one · 2017Article
- Editorial: The Evolution of Rhythm Cognition: Timing in Music and Speech.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Music, like languages, is one of the key components of our culture, yet musical evolution is still poorly known. Numerous studies using computational methods derived from evolutionary biology have been successfully applied to varied subset of linguistic data. One of the major drawback regarding musical studies is the lack of suitable coded musical data that can be analysed using such evolutionary tools. Here we present for the first time an original set of musical data coded in a way that enables construction of trees classically used in evolutionary approaches. Using phylogenetic methods, we test two competing theories on musical evolution: vertical versus horizontal transmission. We show that, contrary to what is currently believed, vertical transmission plays a key role in shaping musical diversity. The signal of vertical transmission is particularly strong for intrinsic musical characters such as metrics, rhythm, and melody. Our findings reveal some of the evolutionary mechanisms at play for explaining musical diversity and open a new field of investigation in musical evolution.
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