New paper: "Large-scale iterated singing experiments reveal oral transmission mechanisms underlying music evolution"

We just published a new paper in the journal Current Biology, entitled "Large-scale iterated singing experiments reveal oral transmission mechanisms underlying music evolution". This was a fun project where we 'evolved' melodies in massive online experiments, getting participants to vocally imitate melodies from each other in long transmission chains. The emergent structures reveal production biases (e.g. vocal constraints) as well as perception biases (e.g. tonality induction) and memory biases. They also suggest interesting effects of social dynamics on melody evolution. The work is another example of next-generation music psychology research unlocked by our PsyNet software. Check out the paper for more details, and congratulations to the lead author Manuel Anglada-Tort!