8/31/2023 0 Comments Social contexts"As a graduate student, I was working on studies of infant music perception and I started to see all these studies that made claims about music being universal," Mehr said. One big answer: Music pervades social life in similar ways all around the world. Published in Science this week, it represents the team's most ambitious study yet about music. Their questions were so compelling that the project rapidly grew into a major, international collaboration with musicians, data scientists, psychologists, linguists, and political scientists. Mehr, Singh, and Glowacki call this database The Natural History of Song. Mehr and Singh added reel-to-reels, vinyl, cassette tapes, CDs, and digital recordings from anthropologists' and ethnomusicologists' private collections to the team's growing discography, combining it with a corpus of ethnography containing nearly 5,000 descriptions of songs from 60 human societies. Mentawai children practicing in a kitchen, Siberut Island, Indonesia. We didn't know what we would find: at one point we found an odd-looking call number, asked a Harvard librarian for help, and twenty minutes later she wheeled out a cart of about 20 cases of reel-to-reel recordings of traditional Celtic music." "But there are thousands and thousands of recordings buried in archives that are not accessible online. "We are so used to being able to find any piece of music that we like on the internet," said Mehr, who is now a principal investigator at Harvard's Music Lab. Over a five-year period, the team hunted down hundreds of recordings in libraries and private collections of scientists half a world away. To answer these questions, they needed a dataset of unprecedented breadth and depth. They set out to answer big questions: Is music a cultural universal? If it is, which musical qualities overlap across disparate societies? If it isn't, why does it seem so ubiquitous? Participants explored more, and earned fewer rewards, in the social versus nonsocial context, suggesting that social uncertainty prompted exploration at the cost of task-relevant goals.The study was conceived by Samuel Mehr, a fellow of the Harvard Data Science Initiative and research associate in psychology, Manvir Singh, a graduate student in Harvard's department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and Luke Glowacki, formerly a Harvard graduate student and now a professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. Here, participants searched for rewards in a series of grids that were either described as comprising real people distributing previously-earned points (social context) or as the result of a computer algorithm or natural phenomenon (nonsocial context). Social environments are of particular interest because a key factor that increases exploration in nonsocial contexts is environmental uncertainty, and the social world is appreciated to be highly uncertain. Exploration choices have been well characterized in nonsocial contexts, but choices to explore (or not) in social environments are less well understood. In decision-making situations that arise repeatedly, there are tradeoffs between: (i) acquiring new information to facilitate future, related decisions (exploration) and (ii) using existing information to secure expected outcomes (exploitation).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |