Judith Becker, Introduction Professor Emerita, University of Michigan In the past two decades there has been an explosion of interest in the biological and cultural evolution of music. Since Darwin first proposed that music is evolutionarily adaptive because of the sexual preference by females for musically gifted mates, the idea that music is an ancient capacity that contributes to the survival of Homo sapiens has many adherents. The “music as adaptive” view has many variants including the theory that music promotes group coherence in terms of action and sociability. Other theories posit that music and language both evolved from a common speech/music style of communication, or that musical behavior is a cultural invention facilitated by biological adaptations that developed for other purposes. The grand issues may not have changed dramatically, but what is striking about the recent developments in biological and cultural musical evolution is the increased subtlety of the approaches. Conclusions concerning the adaptive biological evolution of music tend to be more modest and conditional. Cultural evolutionists interested in the evolution of musical systems are aware of the diversity of the world’s musical systems and have long put behind them notions of unilinear evolutionary progress. In both fields, prominence is given to cross-disciplinary research, to the use of vastly improved technologies, and their work has been deeply informed by the past fifty years of research in ethnomusicology. This panel will present recent research of three scholars, spanning the fields of neuroscience, cognitive psychology and genetic anthropology, whose work exemplifies contemporary studies of musical evolution. 1st presenter: Aniruddh Patel Tufts University The evolutionary history of human musicality: empirical approaches How can we study the biological evolution of the human capacity for music? Over the past century, theories of music’s origins have abounded, with little data to constrain them. One prominent debate has centered on the issue of adaptation: were human bodies and brains specifically shaped for musical behaviors by natural selection, or did music (like reading and writing) arise as a human creation without impetus from biology? This debate has gone on since Darwin’s time and will likely be with us for many years to come. In this talk I argue for a different approach to studying the evolution of our musical abilities, based on empirical research. This approach uses comparative studies with other species to study the evolutionary history of music cognition. The approach is premised on the idea that our musicality reflects the operation of a rich and multifaceted cognitive system, with many processing capacities working in concert. Some of these capacities are likely to be uniquely human, whereas others are likely to be shared with nonhuman animals. If this is true, then no other species will process music as a whole in the same way that we do. Yet certain aspects of music cognition may be present in other species, and this opens the door to studying the evolutionary history of our own musical abilities. For this research program to succeed, it is vital to understand which aspects of musical structure, behavior, and perception are widespread across human cultures 2nd presenter Ian Cross University of Cambridge, UK Mediating social uncertainty: music as communicative social interaction In the folk and the formal theories of music prevalent in western culture that have been developed over the last two hundred years or so, music has come to be regarded as an autonomous domain in which works with hedonic or aesthetic value are produced by specialists for cultural consumption. For such theories, music is relatable to evolutionary theory only contingently. But recent theories that take account of the accumulated weight of ethnomusicological evidence suggest that music has uses and functions that extend beyond the hedonic and aesthetic into the general domain of human sociality. In particular, conceptualizations of music as a medium for interaction that promotes a sense of group solidarity offer good grounds for rethinking music\&##39;s evolutionary foundations. In this paper I shall be exploring evidence which suggests that music and speech can be interpreted as different facets of an underlying communicative toolkit; many cognitive and neuropsychological processes and mechanisms appear common to both music and speech, and music as a participatory medium shares attributes and functions with speech in at least one of its registers, the phatic (that aspect of language in action which establishes and maintains communicative channels rather than representing or referring). This provides a way of thinking about music that allows it to be situated in a wide range of societal and cultural contexts, and that endows it with a distal function-sustaining and shaping the human capacity for sociality that is likely to have had significance in the course of human evolution. 3rd presenter Patrick Savage Tokyo University of the Arts Cultural evolution of music The publication of The Origins of Music (Wallin, Merker and Brown 2000) led to a renaissance of research into the biological evolution of music, but music’s cultural evolution has been less well-explored. Ethnomusicologists have long avoided even the term “cultural evolution” because of its association with racist ideologies in the context of ladder-like Spencerian theories of unilinear evolutionary progress. However, recent work in cultural evolution, particularly in linguistics, have showed that modern evolutionary theory based on Darwinian notions of tree-like diversification can be very useful both for understanding specific mechanisms and processes of cultural change and for understanding broader patterns of human history and cultural contact. I will review results of several interdisciplinary research projects focused on music’s cultural evolution at both the micro- and macro- levels. First, analyses of Charles Seeger’s notations and recordings of 30 versions and variants of Barbara Allen demonstrates that individual songs undergo micro-evolutionary processes of Darwinian “descent with modification” that share many analogues with genetic evolution (e.g., mutating sequences), but also many differences (e.g., mutations can occur by “intelligent design” on the part of the singer). Second, comparative analyses of ~600 traditional folk songs from various populations in and around Japan inspired by Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics Project demonstrate significant correlations with genetic diversity (suggesting shared histories of migration and contact), but differ in important ways (suggesting important differences in macro-evolutionary mechanisms and power dynamics). Cultural evolutionary theory offers a powerful new set of tools to help understand the diversity of the world’s music. Sponsored by Office of the Provost & Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, The Institute for the Humanities, and The School of Music, Theatre & Dance