Ravignani Andrea, Verhoef Tessa
Artificial Intelligence Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel; Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; and Research Department, Sealcentre Pieterburen.
Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University; and Center for Research in Language, University of California, San Diego.
Artif Life. 2018 Spring;24(2):149-153. doi: 10.1162/artl_a_00259. Epub 2018 Apr 17.
Music is a peculiar human behavior, yet we still know little as to why and how music emerged. For centuries, the study of music has been the sole prerogative of the humanities. Lately, however, music is being increasingly investigated by psychologists, neuroscientists, biologists, and computer scientists. One approach to studying the origins of music is to empirically test hypotheses about the mechanisms behind this structured behavior. Recent lab experiments show how musical rhythm and melody can emerge via the process of cultural transmission. In particular, Lumaca and Baggio (2017) tested the emergence of a sound system at the boundary between music and language. In this study, participants were given random pairs of signal-meanings; when participants negotiated their meaning and played a "game of telephone" with them, these pairs became more structured and systematic. Over time, the small biases introduced in each artificial transmission step accumulated, displaying quantitative trends, including the emergence, over the course of artificial human generations, of features resembling properties of language and music. In this Note, we highlight the importance of Lumaca and Baggio's experiment, place it in the broader literature on the evolution of language and music, and suggest refinements for future experiments. We conclude that, while psychological evidence for the emergence of proto-musical features is accumulating, complementary work is needed: Mathematical modeling and computer simulations should be used to test the internal consistency of experimentally generated hypotheses and to make new predictions.
音乐是一种独特的人类行为，但我们对于音乐为何以及如何出现仍然知之甚少。几个世纪以来，音乐研究一直是人文科学的专属领域。然而，近来心理学家、神经科学家、生物学家和计算机科学家对音乐的研究越来越多。研究音乐起源的一种方法是通过实证检验关于这种结构化行为背后机制的假设。最近的实验室实验展示了音乐节奏和旋律如何通过文化传播过程出现。特别是，卢马卡和巴乔（2017年）测试了音乐与语言边界处一种声音系统的出现情况。在这项研究中，给参与者随机配对信号与含义；当参与者协商其含义并进行“传话游戏”时，这些配对变得更具结构性和系统性。随着时间推移，在每个人工传播步骤中引入的小偏差不断累积，呈现出定量趋势，包括在人工模拟的人类代际过程中出现类似于语言和音乐属性的特征。在本短评中，我们强调了卢马卡和巴乔实验的重要性，将其置于关于语言和音乐进化的更广泛文献中，并为未来实验提出改进建议。我们得出结论，虽然关于原音乐特征出现的心理学证据正在积累，但仍需要补充性工作：应使用数学建模和计算机模拟来检验实验产生的假设的内部一致性并做出新的预测。
