The Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, A Global Corpus of Vocal Music

A comprehensive cognitive science requires broad sampling of human behavior to justify general inferences about the mind. For example, the field of psycholinguistics relies on a rich history of comparative study, with many available resources that systematically document many languages. Surprisingly, despite a longstanding interest in questions of universality and diversity, the psychology of music has few such resources. Here, we report the <i>Expanded Natural History of Song Discography</i>, an open-access corpus of vocal music (<i>n</i> = 1007 song excerpts), with accompanying metadata detailing each song's region of origin, language (of 413 languages represented here), and one of 10 behavioral contexts (e.g., work, storytelling, mourning, lullaby, dance). The corpus is designed to sample both broadly, with a large cross-section of societies and languages; and deeply, with many songs representing three well-studied language families (Atlantic-Congo, Austronesian, and Indo-European). This design facilitates direct comparison of musical and vocal features across cultures, principled approaches to sampling stimuli for experiments, and evaluation of models of the cultural evolution of song. In this paper we describe the corpus and provide two proofs of concept, demonstrating its utility. We report (1) a conceptual replication of previous findings that the acoustical forms of songs are predictive of their behavioral contexts, including in previously unstudied contexts (e.g., children's play songs); and (2) similarities in acoustic content of songs across cultures are predictable, in part, by the relatedness of those cultures.

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Publication Details

Journal
Open Mind
Published
2025-01-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi.a.4
Citations
2
Primary Topic
Diverse Musicological Studies
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
38.06

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article

The Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, A Global Corpus of Vocal Music

Thanos Kyritsis, Lidya Yurdum, Constance M. Bainbridge, Mila Bertolo et al.
2 citations
Open Mind
Diverse Musicological Studies
38.06
article

The Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, A Global Corpus of Vocal Music

Thanos Kyritsis, Lidya Yurdum, Constance M. Bainbridge, Mila Bertolo, S. Atwood, Manvir Singh, Jayanthiny Kangatharan, Quentin D. Atkinson, Lana Delasanta, Courtney B. Hilton, Minsang Shin, Dor Shilton, Alma Bitran, H. Hang, Tracy Irani, Samuel A. Mehr, Martynas Snarskis, Jeong-hoon Lee, J. Lang, Alex Mackiel, Vanessa Mak, Kevin Lafleur, Nashua Malko, Anya Keomurjian
article en
2 citations

Abstract

A comprehensive cognitive science requires broad sampling of human behavior to justify general inferences about the mind. For example, the field of psycholinguistics relies on a rich history of comparative study, with many available resources that systematically document many languages. Surprisingly, despite a longstanding interest in questions of universality and diversity, the psychology of music has few such resources. Here, we report the <i>Expanded Natural History of Song Discography</i>, an open-access corpus of vocal music (<i>n</i> = 1007 song excerpts), with accompanying metadata detailing each song's region of origin, language (of 413 languages represented here), and one of 10 behavioral contexts (e.g., work, storytelling, mourning, lullaby, dance). The corpus is designed to sample both broadly, with a large cross-section of societies and languages; and deeply, with many songs representing three well-studied language families (Atlantic-Congo, Austronesian, and Indo-European). This design facilitates direct comparison of musical and vocal features across cultures, principled approaches to sampling stimuli for experiments, and evaluation of models of the cultural evolution of song. In this paper we describe the corpus and provide two proofs of concept, demonstrating its utility. We report (1) a conceptual replication of previous findings that the acoustical forms of songs are predictive of their behavioral contexts, including in previously unstudied contexts (e.g., children's play songs); and (2) similarities in acoustic content of songs across cultures are predictable, in part, by the relatedness of those cultures.

Open MindVol. 9
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (US), Harvard University (US), University of Connecticut (US), University of British Columbia (CA), University of Ottawa (CA), University of Auckland (NZ), University of California, Los Angeles (US), Tel Aviv University (IL), Hebrew University of Jerusalem (IL), Princeton University (US), Yale University (US), University of Chicago (US), Centre for Research on Brain Language and Music (CA), Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (DE), International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (CA), McGill University (CA), University of Pennsylvania (US), University of California, Davis (US), University of Amsterdam (NL)
Royal Society Te Apārangi, National Institutes of Health, Marsden Fund
Openalex Percentile: Top 0%
Diverse Musicological Studies
38.06
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
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