Why collective music-making is sometimes rare: A study of four indigenous societies
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Current prominent music evolution theories suggest music evolved as a participatory group activity, whose adaptive functions were strengthening and/or signaling social cohesion. However, the prevalence of collective music-making varies substantially across societies, and in some cases is exceptionally rare. Here, we consider hypotheses for three factors which could attenuate collective music-making: diminished collective action more generally, an emphasis on musical expertise, and solo-oriented musical styles. We examine data related to these hypotheses in four societies in which collective music-making is rare: the Tsimane of lowland Bolivia, the Ache of eastern Paraguay, the Ayoreo of Bolivia and Paraguay, and the Tuvans of the Russian Republic of Tyva. Our results suggest that the scale and religiosity of collective action are the most important factors related to the overall degree of collective music-making in these cultures. The effect of musical expertise was mostly limited to the dominance of shamans in religious contexts, while well-developed solo musical styles did not necessarily prevent group performance in other social settings. We also note the importance of cultural loss due to influence of invading colonial and imperial forces in diminishing indigenous forms of collective music-making. Notably, in all the cases we consider, episodes of some form of collective music-making do (or historically did) occur during important social events, a fact which supports the group-functionalist view. Our findings also point to the centrality and ubiquity of the religious function of music, and suggest this aspect of musical behavior needs to be better addressed by evolutionary theories of music.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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