Not By Art Alone: Error, Bias, and Chaos in Musical Evolution
Robert Alan Lopez-Hanshaw · 2021
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.