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Sexual Selection for Human Improvisational Musical Ability in the Context of Cognitive Fitness

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Music is a pervasive element of human culture that plays a significant role in our social interactions and goals. The current research regarding the evolutionary nature of music remains divisive, with several groups making competing claims about whether music is an evolved trait and, if it is, what function it…

Music is a pervasive element of human culture that plays a significant role in our social interactions and goals. The current research regarding the evolutionary nature of music remains divisive, with several groups making competing claims about whether music is an evolved trait and, if it is, what function it may serve for survival and reproduction. In an attempt to further define the multiple dimensions of the evolution of music, this study focuses on a specific methodology for determining the relationship between improvisational musical ability, cognitive fitness, and sexual attraction. In Part 1 of this research, piano musicians completed working memory tests and provided 30-second recordings of improvisation. These recordings were heard by participants in Part 2 of the experiment, who rated both the music and a random facial image from an independent database paired with each song. The data revealed that perceived quality of music is positively associated with attractiveness, with a significant effect observed in males of moderate baseline attractiveness. Although the relationship between some working memory measures and musical improvisational ability proved not to be statistically significant, auditory working memory span yielded a marginally significant result. The overall results are consistent with a sexual selection theory of the evolution of musical improvisation and suggest appropriate avenues for future research.
ContributorsTesch, Anna (Author) / Patten, Kristopher (Thesis director) / Becker, Vaughn (Committee member) / Knowles, Kristina (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2022-05
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Complimenting the Setting: How Video Game Soundtrack Music Evokes its Environment

Description
Instrumental music has been used to evoke natural environments and their qualities for centuries, and composers have employed a variety of methods in order to successfully invoke such sensations in their listeners. When composers and sound teams for video game soundtracks write pieces to accompany in-game settings, they may use…

Instrumental music has been used to evoke natural environments and their qualities for centuries, and composers have employed a variety of methods in order to successfully invoke such sensations in their listeners. When composers and sound teams for video game soundtracks write pieces to accompany in-game settings, they may use a similar set of strategies. The nature of these tracks as an accompaniment to an interactive visual media and as a piece that must be able to indefinitely loop leads them to emphasize environment over emotion, and thus draws out or exaggerates these same techniques. This study seeks to understand the relationships between the acoustics of various setting backing tracks and the perceptual qualities of environments that listeners feel they evoke through the statistical method of multidimensional scaling. The relationships of three perceptual factors (coldness, brightness, wetness) and two acoustic factors (beats-per-minute, spectral envelope slope) are of greatest interest in this study.
ContributorsJackson, Jalen (Author) / Azuma, Tamiko (Thesis director) / Patten, Kristopher (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Speech & Hearing Science (Contributor)
Created2022-05