Cultural Evolution

The history of music: Approaches from cultural evolution and musicology

The Rest is Silence: Leveraging Unseen Species Models for Computational Musicology

How many composers are we missing in RISM? What percentage of medieval sources of Gregorian chant have we already cataloged? How many differences in music prints do we expect to find between editions? How large is the coverage of songs from genres of a folk music tradition? And how close are we in estimating the size of the harmonic vocabulary of a large number of composers?

Modeling the Evolution of Harmony in Popular Music from Different Cultural Contexts

Here, we introduce music-theoretically sensible notions of harmonic distance between chords, that allows us to arrive at more fine-grained results regarding relative influences of different kinds of harmonic relations on diachronic changes.

Historical Changes of Modes and their Substructure Modeled as Pitch Distributions in Plainchant from the 1100s to the 1500s

Here, we analyze more than 40 000 pieces of plainchant to better understand the evolution of modes and pitch distributions in a period of five centuries that saw the development of the Western modal practice.

Totoli's Art of Lelegesan: Analyzing Sociocultural Context and Musical Content