Science & Cocktails 2013 med Armand Leroy

How music evolves Why do humans make music and most animals don’t? Where does the human music making instinct comes from? Is the information contained in music similar to a population’s DNA? Can we reconstruct the songs that we sang thousands of years ago from the songs we have today? Like DNA, music is transmitted from person to person, from generation to generation and like all things that are transmitted, it is modified. Darwin called this ’modification by descent’. So music changes like DNA changes, like languages change. So why shouldn’t we be able to reconstruct the distant past with songs like we do with DNA? In the 60’s, Alan Lomax and other researchers developed the method of Cantometrics: how to measure songs not just based on melodies but on performance qualities. Properties like vocal attack, if the song is sung with open mouth, closed mouth, in a step wise fashion, etc. Lomax gathered a data bank of 5000 songs of 800 different cultures and put it in a big