To Coggroup list members,

See below information re a CIRMMT talk this week by Samuel Mehr.

Apologies for cross-posting.

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Title: The Natural History of Song 20 April 2017 13h30-14h30 A512, Elizabeth Wirth Music Building, 527 Sherbrooke St W To access room A512, please enter the music library on the 3rd floor and then take the stairs or elevator within the library to the 5th floor.

more info: http://www.cirmmt.org/activities/seminars/samuel-mehr-natural-history-of-son...

Samuel Mehr: The Natural History of Song — CIRMMThttp://www.cirmmt.org/activities/seminars/samuel-mehr-natural-history-of-song-project www.cirmmt.org To access room A512, please enter the music library on the 3rd floor and then take the stairs or elevator within the library to the 5th floor.

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.