What is music, and why did it evolve? How can we understand the unity and diversity found throughout the world?s music? Scientific attempts to answer these questions through cross-cultural comparison stalled during the 20th century and have only recently begun to make a resurgence. In this talk, I will synthesize recent advances to outline a new unified theoretical/methodological framework to understand and compare all of the world’s music. This framework takes advantage of new scientific theories and methods - particularly from advances in computer science, psychology, genetic anthropology, and cultural evolution - to apply comparative musicological research to answer longstanding questions about the origins of music and to contemporary issues including music copyright law and UNESCO policy. In doing so, I argue for an inclusive, multidisciplinary field that combines the qualitative methods traditionally employed by musicologists and cultural anthropologists with quantitative methods from the natural sciences.

The DH Research Seminar is a series of talks organised by the Digital Humanities Institute of EPFL given by researchers from a wide range of backgrounds and aiming at presenting the vast array of subjects covered by Digital Humanities.