On reappearance and complexity in musical calling

Music is especially valued in human societies, but music-like behavior in the form of song also occurs in a variety of other animal groups including primates. The calling of our primate ancestors may well have evolved into the music of modern humans via multiple selective scenarios. But efforts to uncover these influences have been hindered by the challenge of precisely defining musical behavior in a way that could be more generally applied across species. We propose an acoustic focused reconsideration of “musicality” that could help enable independent inquiry into potential ecological pressures on the evolutionary emergence of such behavior. Using published spectrographic images (n = 832 vocalizations) from the primate vocalization literature, we developed a quantitative formulation that could be used to help recognize signatures of human-like musicality in the acoustic displays of other species. We visually scored each spectrogram along six structural features from human music—tone, interval, transposition, repetition, rhythm, and syllabic variation—and reduced this multivariate assessment into a concise measure of musical patterning, as informed by principal components analysis. The resulting acoustic reappearance diversity index (ARDI) estimates the number of different reappearing syllables within a call type. ARDI is in concordance with traditional measures of bird song complexity yet more readily identifies shorter, more subtly melodic primate vocalizations. We demonstrate the potential utility of this index by using it to corroborate several origins scenarios. When comparing ARDI scores with ecological features, our data suggest that vocalizations with diversely reappearing elements have a pronounced association with both social and environmental factors. Musical calls were moderately associated with wooded habitats and arboreal foraging, providing partial support for the acoustic adaptation hypothesis. But musical calling was most strongly associated with social monogamy, suggestive of selection for constituents of small family-sized groups by neighboring conspecifics. In sum, ARDI helps construe musical behavior along a continuum, accommodates non-human musicality, and enables gradualistic co-evolutionary paths between primate taxa—ranging from the more inhibited locational calls of archaic primates to the more exhibitional displays of modern apes.

Music in Quarantine: Connections Between Changes in Lifestyle, Psychological States, and Musical Behaviors During COVID-19 Pandemic

Music is not only the art of organized sound but also a compound of social interaction among people, built upon social and environmental foundations. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, containment measures such as shelter-in-place, lockdown, social distancing, and self-quarantine have severely impacted the foundation of human society, resulting in a drastic change in our everyday experience. In this paper, the relationships between musical behavior, lifestyle, and psychological states during the shelter-in-place period of the COVID-19 pandemic are investigated. An online survey on musical experience, lifestyle changes, stress level, musical behaviors, media usage, and environmental sound perception was conducted. The survey was conducted in early June 2020. Responses from 620 people in 24 countries were collected, with the large proportion of the responses coming from the U.S. (55.5%) and India (21.4%). Structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis revealed causal relationships between lifestyle, stress, and music behaviors. Elements such as stress-level change, work risk, and staying home contribute to changes in musical experiences, such as moderating emotion with music, feeling emotional with music, and being more attentive to music. Stress-level change was correlated with work risk and income change, and people who started living with others due to the outbreak, especially with their children, indicated less change in stress level. People with more stress-level change tended to use music more purposefully for their mental well-being, such as to moderate emotions, to influence mood, and to relax. In addition, people with more stress-level change tend to be more annoyed by neighbors' noise. Housing type was not directly associated with annoyance; however, attention to environmental sounds decreased when the housing type was smaller. Attention to environmental and musical sounds and the emotional responses to them are highly inter-correlated. Multi-group SEM based on musicians showed that the causal relationship structure for professional musicians differs from that of less-experienced musicians. For professional musicians, staying at home was the only component that caused all musical behavior changes; stress did not cause musical behavior changes. Regarding Internet use, listening to music via YouTube and streaming was preferred over TV and radio, especially among less-experienced musicians, while participation in the online music community was preferred by more advanced musicians. This work suggests that social, environmental, and personal factors and limitations influence the changes in our musical behavior, perception of sonic experience, and emotional recognition, and that people actively accommodated the unusual pandemic situations using music and Internet technologies.

Musical calling as a behavior ancestral to all modern primates

Music is a singular behavior humans exhibit via the creation of patterned sounds organized, for example, along rhythmic and melodic dimensions. Music-like behavior, however, also appears in many other animals including non-human primates. Calls with western musical attributes are primarily ascribed to species of gibbon, tarsier, indri, and potentially also marmoset, tamarin, and titi monkeys. A recent survey of primates, using a continuous measure of acoustic musicality, suggests that many other species—including galagos, several lemurs, and some old-world monkeys—also exhibit calls with music-like qualities. Based on this ubiquity and a recent arboreal-origins theory for musical behavior, I hypothesized that the ancestor of all living primates was likewise also somewhat musical. Ancestral character estimation was used to reconstruct ancestral phylogenetic states using scored spectrographic depictions of vocalizations of extant primates (n=58 species) to determine if musical calling is the initial primate condition. The results suggest that nearly all primate families have an ancestor with at least one moderately music-like call—two or more reappearing syllables—with the clear exception of Cercopithecine. These cheek-pouch monkeys likely experienced a multi-million year diminution in musical behavior, perhaps in conjunction with their recent adaptations for quadrupedal terrestriality. These findings largely indicate that exhibition of at least one music-like call is a normal, and likely quite ancient, constituent of primate vocalization behavior.

Universality and diversity in human song

What is universal about music, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world’s societies, as well as a discography of audio recordings. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music (including songs with words) appears in every society observed; that music varies along three dimensions (formality, arousal, religiosity), more within societies than across them; and that music is associated with certain behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography—analyzed through machine summaries, amateur and expert listener ratings, and manual transcriptions—reveals that acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral context; that tonality is widespread, perhaps universal; that music varies in rhythmic and melodic complexity; and that elements of melodies and rhythms found worldwide follow power laws.

AKTUALISASI SIMBOL-SIMBOL PERLAWANAN DALAM PERTUNJUKAN MUSIK HIP-HOP TRAHGALI SOULJA DI SURAKARTA

This paper contains the actualization of resistance symbols contained in the performances of Trahgali Soulja, a hip-hop music group based in Surakarta. This includes reviewing the audience’s response to the music performed. The problems that arise are (1) the efforts of the Soulja Trahgali music group in constructing the symbols of resistance, (2) the form of actualization of ideas or the construction of symbols through the stage actions performed by Trahgali Soulja that illustrate the ideology of resistance, and ( 3) audience’s response to the stage action offered by Trahgali Soulja. The production and packaging of Trahgali Soulja’s performances are carried out on the backstage/back region - including the discovery of musical ideology, the process of interpreting the ideology of resistance, and the behind-the-scene communications among players. Then a scenario for the performance is employed in the stage action on the front stage/front region, and of course there are elements to support the performances being prepared. The positive response is shown by the audience with the emergence of the Red Ax Soldier community which supports the entire behavior of Trahgali Soulja, and not even rarely did this community adopt the musical behavior of Trahgali Soulja. In addition, social media such as Facebook, YouTube and Instagram also become the showrooms for this group’s hip-hop songs.Keywords: actualization, symbol of resistance, hip-hop music performances, trahgali soulja.

Validity, Reliability, and Fairness in Music Testing

This chapter presents and discusses validity, reliability, and fairness within the framework of measurement and evaluation, and contextualizes it in the field of music education. A test can be described as the collection and interpretation of data representing a particular musical behavior using a systematic and uniform procedure. As such, a test in music can encompass the evaluation of any number of musical behaviors and the collection of data using any number of techniques. With any test, the collection of data needs to be valid, reliable, and fair in order to ensure quality and provide defensibility of the assessment. More specifically, test users need to ensure that a test measures what it purports to measure (i.e., validity); be confident that students with similar knowledge, skills, and abilities will receive similar scores across repeated administrations (i.e., reliability); and certify that the test is accessible and appropriate for all students (i.e., fairness). Historical, theoretical, and applied perspectives of validity, reliability, and fairness are discussed.

Musical Social Entrainment

Over the last decade, the concept of entrainment—emerging from the fields of physics and biology—has grown as a tool for investigating rhythmic adjustments among musicians, and between different groups of musicians. When combined with methods of audio data analysis, this approach has benefits for the assessment of musical behavior, previously limited to largely descriptive ethnomusicological research based on ethnographic data collected through field study. However, musical behavior is not only biophysically determined, but also a highly social activity. Therefore, this article focuses on “social entrainment”—a concept coined by the social scientists Joseph E. McGrath and Janice R. Kelly in 1986 which recently has been taken up in music research. Relating this concept to certain approaches in relevant current empirical studies on interpersonal coordination, the authors develop their own categories of social behavior, which are broader than those of social entrainment but can accordingly be applied to the social entrainment that may occur in musical practices. These categories range from basic behaviors that do not involve social cognition but are meaningful to interacting individuals and groups, to high-order social behaviors that require collective intentionality and can lead to sophisticated interaction involving music-specific phenomena such as a “groove.” Consequently, a concept of entrainment which goes beyond both an adaptation of the established concept of physical and biological entrainment and McGrath and Kelly’s original concept of social entrainment is proposed: “musical social entrainment.” The authors use this term to refer to intra-individual, inter-individual, intra-group, and inter-group entrainment to exogenous musical rhythms—including the rhythms of other musically acting individuals and groups—embedded in a social context and contributing to sociality. Finally, reviewing selected studies relevant to musical social entrainment, the authors discuss problems and open questions concerning music-related entrainment research, and potential contributions in the future of entrainment studies in general.

Universality and diversity in human song

What is universal about music across human societies, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world’s societies and a discography of audio recordings of the music itself. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music appears in every society observed; that variation in musical behavior is well-characterized by three dimensions, which capture the formality, arousal, and religiosity of song events; that musical behavior varies more within societies than across societies on these dimensions; and that music is regularly associated with behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography, analyzed through four representations (machine summaries, listener ratings, expert annotations, expert transcriptions), revealed that identifiable acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral function worldwide, and that these features fall along two dimensions, melodic and rhythmic complexity. These analyses show how applying the tools of computational social science to rich bodies of humanistic data can reveal both universal features and patterns of variability in culture, addressing longstanding debates about each.