Samuel Mehr: The Natural History of Song

SamuelMehr

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Abstract

In 1871, Darwin wrote, “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed.” Nearly 150 years later, the origins of music are still a mystery. Why are we musical? Evolutionary accounts of music predict that it should share a variety of universal behavioral and acoustical features across human cultures, but the evidence base with which to test these predictions has been limited. The Natural History of Song is a new effort to systematically examine the world's vocal music via large-dataset approaches to ethnographic text, field recordings, and transcriptions. In this talk, I will present an overview of the project and use it for three tests of universals in a single form of music, infant-directed song. First, listeners recruited online from several cultures reliably distinguish infant-directed songs from other music, despite their unfamiliarity with the cultures from which the songs are drawn. Second, ethnographic text concerning infancy is more robustly associated with vocal music than it is with other, non-musical topics, in a 40-million word database. Third, a variety of features associated with infant-directed song and documented in both datasets show striking consistency across cultures. The findings confirm key predictions of a new theory of the evolution of infant-directed music (Mehr & Krasnow, 2017). More generally, however, they demonstrate the utility of large-dataset, cross-cultural examinations like the Natural History of Song, which provide open-access tools and artifacts that enrich the scientific and humanistic study of music.

Biography

Samuel Mehr is a developmental and evolutionary psychologist who conducts research on the basic science of music: what music is, how music works, and where music comes from. In June 2017, he will begin an appointment as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Harvard's Department of Psychology, supported by the Harvard Data Science Initiative. He co-founded and directs the Natural History of Song, a systematic investigation of the world's vocal music (naturalhistoryofsong.org). He completed graduate studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he was advised by Howard Gardner, Elizabeth Spelke, and Steven Pinker, and during which time he conducted research at Harvard's Department of Psychology, in the Laboratory for Developmental Studies (with Elizabeth Spelke) and the Evolutionary Psychology Laboratory (with Max Krasnow). His research has been published in Psychological Science, Evolution and Human Behavior, Developmental Science, Journal of Research in Music Education, and the open-access journals Frontiers in Psychology and PLOS ONE. He has written for the public about music research in The New York Times and on Reddit, and his research has been covered by Nature, The Washington Post, CBC News, Discover Magazine, National Public Radio, BBC Radio, and The Times of London. In 2014, he was named among the Top 30 Thinkers under 30 by Pacific Standard Magazine. Papers and additional information are available at http://s.mehr.cz.