Not By Art Alone: Error, Bias, and Chaos in Musical Evolution

Musical change is an example of cultural evolution. This chapter, to be included in "Music in Human Experience: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Musical Species" edited by Johnathan Friedmann, outlines the interplay between cultural values and cognitive biases within an evolutionary framework. This also includes an introduction to concepts specific to cultural evolution, such as guided variation and constrained mutation. Juliette Blevins' Evolutionary Phonology framework is extended to music, treating pitch systems as phonological systems, subject to similar cognitive biases that result in similar patterns of change. Cultural values surrounding music then act upon the output of lower-level "phonological" processes, both as selective forces and as influences on musicians' "guided variation." Because the resulting patterns show some hallmarks of chaotic behavior, the chapter concludes by advocating an agent-based modeling approach.

Introduction

The chapter deals with the origin and phonetic causes of sound changes involving consonants, with the diachronic pathways connecting the input and output phonetic forms, and with models of sound change (e.g., Evolutionary Phonology, the Neogrammarian’s articulatory model, Ohala’s acoustic equivalence model). The need to use articulatory and acoustic data for ascertaining the causes of sound change (and in particular the palatalization and assibilation of velar, labial, and dentoalveolar obstruents) is emphasized. The chapter is also concerned with how allophones are phonologized in sound-change processes and with the special status of (alveolo)palatal stops regarding allophonic phonologization.

`Markedness' is an epiphenomenon of random phonetically grounded sound change

The concept of `markedness' has been influential in phonology for almost a century, but a recent movement in the field has argued that phonological theories do not need to make reference to the concept; instead, if it is meaningful at all, markedness should be thought of as emergent. In this paper, we propose a simple mathematical model based on the principles of Evolutionary Phonology (EP; Blevins 2004) to explore how a theory without markedness can replicate some of the insights of the markedness-based worldview. We see that markedness can be treated as an epiphenomenon of random, phonetically grounded sound change.

Natural Sound Change and Its Patterns: The Case of the Lateral Approximant l

In light of Chinese historical phonology, modern dialects, languages of Chinese minorities and field phonetics, this paper discusses (1) the development of the Yi-initial words from Old Chinese to Middle Chinese, (2) the development of the Lai-initial words from Middle Chinese to modern dialects, (3) the phonological behavior of segment l in different syllabic positions from the perspective of evolutionary phonology. Such evolutionary developments as palatalization, velarization, nasalization, labiodentalization, fricativization, strengthening and so on can be identified for approximant l. This provides an important panchronic and typological perspective for the interpretation of both diachronic changes and synchronic variation.

The Evolutionary Phonology of Glottal Stops in K’ichean

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