Fascinating paper, Evolution of music by public choice, in PNAS.* The paper is open access, but ScienceNow has a serviceable summary. One somewhat obvious implication from this sort of research, which utilizes human preference to shape a cultural form, is that the topography of human artistic expression is non-arbitrary. In other words, aesthetics is not just historically contingent fiction, but draws upon a deep well of our sense of beauty and pleasure, whether for adaptive or non-adaptive reasons (i.e., culture as byproduct, later subject to functional selection).
But I’m struck by the last section:
The DarwinTunes system can, similarly, be extended to accommodate these additional selective forces by allowing individual consumers to select among variants (i.e., compose) before releasing them into the population or by allowing consumers to see each other’s preferences. The relative importance of selection at these different levels—producer, consumer, and consumer-group—in shaping the evolution of the world’s music is unknown and may vary among societies. Western societies have long had specialist guilds of composers and performers; however, in other cultures, participation is more widespread [e.g., early 20th century Andaman Islanders]. The ability to download, manipulate, and distribute music via social-networking sites has democratized the production of music …