The Origins of Music: Preface - Preface

This diversity could actually be increased if female song preferences

could change faster,altering within any given female’s lifetime rather

than just between mother and daughter.This is exactly the role that

learning can play,enabling adaptations faster than evolution can accom-

plish (Todd and Miller 1991b).By combining (co)evolution and learn-

ing,we may be able to explore further questions about musical diversity

relating to culture and individual song complexity.

One obvious place we could add learning to our system is in the cre-

ation of female musical expectations:where should their transition tables

come from? In our current setup,females inherit transition tables from

their mother and father.Because of this,“surprising”note transitions can

be surprising only relative to a particular female’s inherited expectations.

But certainly for humans,and for other animals as well,expectations

are built up through experience and learning within one’s lifetime (see

Bharucha and Todd 1989).Instead we can let a female learn expectations

about note transitions based on a set of songs from her current genera-

tion,or from the previous generation,as if she has heard those songs and

picked up knowledge of her culture from them.Then she will be surprised

when she hears something new that toys with these learned expectations,

building them up,and violating them.We expect that using learning to

384 Peter Todd

Figure 20.4

Diversity of songs in a noncoevolving global-preference sample-size-twenty population,

showing loss of diversity over time.

Fig.20.4