New special issue on "Cultural evolution of the arts" led by @sobchuk.bsky.social and @masonyoungblood.bsky.social confirms my intuition that this field has taken off in the past two decades, with a particularly strong representation from music! doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

Pat Savage@patrickesavage.bsky.social · 4mo ago

@culturalevolsoc.bsky.social conference draft programme is up: airess.fgses-um6p.ma/CES2026 Psyched to see so much music! (at least 13 presentations on human music, plus more on bird/whale song etc.)

"One test, many tongues: Surveying language proficiency across the globe" out now in @pnasnexus.org A practical challenge in online experiments with global participants is testing language proficiency. We automated the generation of language tests across nearly 2,000 languages.

Proc B with @sampassmore.bsky.social! We used simulations to explore the innovation strategies of speed climbers 🧗‍♀️ Innovation is higher among slower athletes and lower when the population size is larger, and the overall balance of innovation and copying appears to be suboptimal 🔗 bit.ly/499QjZM

Simulation-based inference with deep learning suggests speed climbers combine innovation and copying to improve performance

Abstract. In the Olympic sport of speed climbing, athletes compete to reach the top of a 15 m wall as quickly as possible. Since the standardization of the

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After few flights and 8hrs of canoe ride up the Maniqui river, we met the Tsimane villagers in Bolivian Amazon to understand what they find appealing to hear and see, and how they compare to other parts of the world. @manuelangladatort.bsky.social @norijacoby.bsky.social

7.5 years after signing the contract, I finally submitted the full manuscript of my book to Oxford University Press!!! Thanks to Keio's Fukuzawa Fund, it will be published open access. You can already read the submitted version as a preprint at osf.io/b36fm I hope you all find it useful!

Extremely honoured to be the recipient of the Best Student Paper award at the upcoming ICMPC 2025 in São Paulo, the largest international conference on music cognition and perception. All possible through working with the great team and supervisors.

Nori Jacoby@norijacoby.bsky.social · last yr.

I am proud to share that my PhD student @harinlee.info co-supervised by Marc Schönwiesner, has won the student best paper award at #ICMPC! www.icmpc2025.abcogmus.com/conteudo/vie... If you are interested in doing cutting edge work on music and culture consider joining us on @co3lab.bsky.social

Big cities are vibrant hubs of culture, but why exactly is that? Now out in @natcomms.nature.com, we analysed music listening patterns of over 2.5 million people and demographics to examine mechanisms driving cultural diversity. With @researchdeezer.bsky.social @norijacoby.bsky.social Highlights ⬇

Ready to submit my PhD thesis. After taking this picture I realised that the thesis cover I designed matches the lamp and the sofa in my flat. Definitely some psychological priming going on here!

Excited to share two papers tapping into cross-cultural perception of aesthetics and word associations to music emotion across languages. Accepted to be presented at the upcoming CogSci 2025 conference! @mpicbs.bsky.social

Serving as a co-chair for ISMIR 2025 in Korea, we are excited to announce call for the music-program! If you have MIR integrated creative music performance in mind to be performed at gorgeous KAIST auditorium, do consider applying. Submission: ismir2025.ismir.net/call-for-music Deadline: 30th June

Tomorrow at Cambridge! Visiting the Centre for Music & Science led by @pmcharrison.bsky.social www.mus.cam.ac.uk/events/under...

Emotional to be returning to Goldsmiths where did my undergrad and masters! @goldsmithsuol.bsky.social

Manuel Anglada-Tort@manuelangladatort.bsky.social · last yr.

Excited to announce our next Whitehead Lecture by @harinlee.info on Understanding Music in the Age of Machine Learning. Join us online or in person: Wednesday, 4pm (see link). @goldsmithsuol.bsky.social #MusicCognition #BigData

Pleased to see our work published: The Ties That Bind: Computational, Cross-cultural Analyses of Knots Reveal Their Cultural Evolutionary History and Significance We analysed knots across 12,000 years and 82 societies. Time to tie a thread 🧵 about why knots matter. doi.org/10.1017/S095...

Bringing EEG brain science to Berghain club, Berlin 🧠🎛️ Next weekend I’m teaming up with a Berlin-based DJ/producer “Egregore” to integrate brain oscillations to live ambient music. We will control melodic pulses with neural tempo and use different mind states to alter fragments of sounds!

We constructed emotional arcs from over 6.763 song lyrics […] songs characterized by sorrowful plots and endings receive higher scores than those with more joyful emotional themes. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

‘Do songs tell stories?’ An empirical analysis of the effect of emotional arcs on success in a national song contest - Journal of Cultural Economics

This article explores whether the lyrics of songs influence their success in a national song contest. We constructed emotional arcs from over 6.763 song lyrics and examined their impact on contest per...

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New cultural evolution modelling paper with @bdecourson.bsky.social on @pnas.org! "Weak individual preferences stabilize culture" A quick 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🚨 New paper! 🚨 by Yoolim Kim, @helenamiton.bsky.social, Marc Allassonnière Tang, & myself, in Journal of Memory and Language. We tried to do for letter shapes what phonologists did for speech sounds. doi.org/10.1016/j.jm... A 🧵 (1/14)

Andy Whiten and I wrote a @science.org perspective about a cool new study from @inbalarnon.bsky.social @simonkirby.bsky.social @ellengarland.bsky.social et al! They found humpback whale song has language-like statistical structure, using methods inspired by infant language learning 🐋🎶 Links below ⬇️

📢 Incredible postdoc position for early career researchers in cultural evolution with the amazing @oliviermorin.bsky.social at ENS, Paris. Deadline 20th March! @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social @eslr.bsky.social

Change over time is often depicted as a trendline. But what does shape a trendline? Which forces? Our new paper presents a method allowing to “decompose” trendlines into constituent forces. Also, we tackle an old puzzle: Does culture change “one funeral at a time”? 🧵(1/8) doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

Do whales optimize their vocalizations for efficiency, just like human language? 🐋🎶 My latest study in Science Advances (@science.org) suggests they do—following linguistic laws seen in human speech. 🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Language-like efficiency in whale communication

Whale vocalizations follow efficiency rules seen in human language, revealing striking similarities in communication systems.

science.org

Finding your first postdoc job can be daunting and resembles Squid Game. So that others don't go through the same trouble, I'll be sharing my insights on where and when to look, what to prepare etc. Tomorrow 12pm CET and will also stream via zoom (send me DM for a link). Here are some highlights 🦑

📣📣📣 Applications for the 2025 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) are now open!! Are you interested in intelligence, mind, and cognition in all its forms? Early-career scholars from any discipline—and storytellers in any medium—are encouraged to apply! More info: disi.org

We are recruiting PhD students! Our research covers a diverse range of topics, including perception and internal representations, cultural evolution, large-scale online experiments, cross-cultural studies, and computational music cognition. Please spread the word!

Wow the silencing in X is so real. Many of my friends saw the post but couldn't interact and it shadow banned these posts...

Attended this last year and was truly an inspiring experience. Great crowd and toulouse is absolutely gorgeous. Highly recommend!

Jorge Peña 🇵🇸@jorgeapenas.bsky.social · 2y ago

📢 Please repost 📢 Applications for the Toulouse Summer School in Quantitative Social Sciences (May 26 - Jun 20 2025) are now open. Brochure and more info: www.tse-fr.eu/sites/defaul... Application form (deadline, Dec 15 2024): www.tse-fr.eu/toulouse-sum...

Incredible opportunity to work with Mason, the one and only!

Mason Youngblood@masonyoungblood.bsky.social · 2y ago

Extended deadline to 12/15/24! Postdoc position on creativity/innovation in culture with an interdisciplinary team at @stonybrooku.bsky.social - Feel free to DM if you have questions 😊 bit.ly/creativity_d...

Extended deadline to 12/15/24! Postdoc position on creativity/innovation in culture with an interdisciplinary team at @stonybrooku.bsky.social - Feel free to DM if you have questions 😊 bit.ly/creativity_d...

Dynamics of Creativity and Innovation in Complex Social Networks - Postdoc Listing

POSTDOC: Dynamics of Creativity and Innovation in Complex Social Networks Institute for Advanced Computational Science Stony Brook University Deadline: December 15, 2024 Expected Duration: January 1...

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Great to see the community has become more vibrant over here! I have now made the switch, bye X ✋

Our paper is out in this cool special issue on cognitive technologies. It’s on the topic of traditional and informal measurement systems across cultural traditions. How have people *really* measured their world? with @mamanninen.bsky.social @jussiteronen.bsky.social doi.org/10.1111/tops...

Measuring Beyond the Standard: Informal Measurement Systems as Cognitive Technologies

This paper examines measurement as a cognitive technology, focusing on the coexistence of formal and informal systems. Through analysis of body-based units and proportional heuristics, it reveals how...

doi.org