Contagious heterophony: A new theory about the origins of music
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two of the most salient features of music are the blending of pitch and the matching of time. I propose here a possible evolutionary precursor of human music based on a process I call “contagious heterophony”. Heterophony is a form of pitch blending in which individuals generate similar musical lines but in which these lines are poorly synchronized. A wonderful example can be found in the howling of wolves. Each wolf makes a similar call but the resultant chorus is poorly blended in time. The other major feature of the current hypothesis is contagion. Once one animal starts calling, other members of the group join in through a spreading process. While this type of heterophonic calling is well-represented in nature, synchronized polyphony is not. In this article, I discuss evolutionary scenarios by which the human capacity to integrate musical parts in pitch-space and in time may have emerged in music. In doing so, I make mention of neuroimaging findings that shed light on the neural mechanisms of vocal imitation and metric entrainment in humans, two key processes underlying musical integration.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it