TY - JOUR

T1 - Phylogenetic Reconstruction of the Cultural Evolution of Electronic Music via Dynamic Community Detection (1975-1999)

AU - Youngblood, Mason

AU - Baraghith, Karim

AU - Savage, Patrick

N1 - Funding information: First and foremost, we thank the artists whose work inspired this project and made our analysis possible. We also thank the many Discogs users who contributed so much time and effort to cataloguing the history of electronic music. This research was supported, in part, by Grant-in-Aid 19KK0064 from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science , National Science Foundation Grants CNS-0958379 , CNS-0855217 , ACI-1126113 and the City University of New York High Performance Computing Center at the College of Staten Island.

PY - 2021/11

Y1 - 2021/11

N2 - Phylogenetic trees or networks representing cultural evolution are typically built using methods from biology that use similarities and differences in cultural traits to infer the historical relationships between the populations that produced them. While these methods have yielded important insights, researchers continue to debate the extent to which cultural phylogenies are tree-like or reticulated due to high levels of horizontal transmission. In this study, we propose a novel method for phylogenetic reconstruction using dynamic community detection that focuses not on the cultural traits themselves (e.g., musical features), but the people creating them (musicians). We used data from 1,498,483 collaborative relationships between electronic music artists to construct a cultural phylogeny based on observed population structure. The results suggest that, although vertical transmission appears to be dominant, the potential for horizontal transmission (indexed by between-population linkage) is relatively high and populations never become fully isolated from one another. In addition, we found evidence that electronic music diversity has increased between 1975 and 1999. The method used in this study is available as a new R package called DynCommPhylo. Future studies should apply this method to other cultural systems such as academic publishing and film, as well as biological systems where high resolution reproductive data is available, and develop formal inferential models to assess how levels of reticulation in evolution vary across domains.

AB - Phylogenetic trees or networks representing cultural evolution are typically built using methods from biology that use similarities and differences in cultural traits to infer the historical relationships between the populations that produced them. While these methods have yielded important insights, researchers continue to debate the extent to which cultural phylogenies are tree-like or reticulated due to high levels of horizontal transmission. In this study, we propose a novel method for phylogenetic reconstruction using dynamic community detection that focuses not on the cultural traits themselves (e.g., musical features), but the people creating them (musicians). We used data from 1,498,483 collaborative relationships between electronic music artists to construct a cultural phylogeny based on observed population structure. The results suggest that, although vertical transmission appears to be dominant, the potential for horizontal transmission (indexed by between-population linkage) is relatively high and populations never become fully isolated from one another. In addition, we found evidence that electronic music diversity has increased between 1975 and 1999. The method used in this study is available as a new R package called DynCommPhylo. Future studies should apply this method to other cultural systems such as academic publishing and film, as well as biological systems where high resolution reproductive data is available, and develop formal inferential models to assess how levels of reticulation in evolution vary across domains.

KW - Community detection

KW - Cultural evolution

KW - Electronic music

KW - Horizontal transmission

KW - Phylogenetics

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85110743441&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2021.06.002

DO - 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2021.06.002

M3 - Article

VL - 42

SP - 573

EP - 582

JO - Evolution and Human Behavior

JF - Evolution and Human Behavior

SN - 1090-5138

IS - 6

ER -