Marc Schönwiesner

Harin Lee, Rainer Polak, Manuel Anglada-Tort et al.

Music comprises two core structural components, melody and rhythm, that vary widely across cultures. Whether these components coevolve in a coupled way or follow independent trajectories remains unclear. We introduce a novel computational pipeline to extract vocal melodic pitch-interval and percussive inter-onset timing distributions from 27,628 popular songs across 59 countries, enabling large-scale cross-cultural comparison that bypasses traditional music annotations. Musical similarities between countries aligned with geographic and linguistic relationships, validating our approach. Substantial variation emerged in both melodic and rhythmic structures across countries, yet the diversity of the two components was not significantly correlated, challenging assumptions of coupled evolution. Only rhythmic diversity was significantly associated with ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity, while melodic diversity showed no such association. These findings suggest that melody and rhythm constitute partially independent systems shaped by distinct cultural and evolutionary pressures, rather than components of a single monolithic musical style.

Harin Lee, Frank Hoeger, Marc Schoenwiesner et al.

Do people from different cultural backgrounds perceive the mood in music the same way? How closely do human ratings across different cultures approximate automatic mood detection algorithms that are often trained on corpora of predominantly Western popular music? Analyzing 166 participants responses from Brazil, South Korea, and the US, we examined the similarity between the ratings of nine categories of perceived moods in music and estimated their alignment with four popular mood detection algorithms. We created a dataset of 360 recent pop songs drawn from major music charts of the countries and constructed semantically identical mood descriptors across English, Korean, and Portuguese languages. Multiple participants from the three countries rated their familiarity, preference, and perceived moods for a given song. Ratings were highly similar within and across cultures for basic mood attributes such as sad, cheerful, and energetic. However, we found significant cross-cultural differences for more complex characteristics such as dreamy and love. To our surprise, the results of mood detection algorithms were uniformly correlated across human ratings from all three countries and did not show a detectable bias towards any particular culture. Our study thus suggests that the mood detection algorithms can be considered as an objective measure at least within the popular music context.

Jessica A. F. Thompson, Yoshua Bengio, Elia Formisano et al.

Deep learning, computational neuroscience, and cognitive science have overlapping goals related to understanding intelligence such that perception and behaviour can be simulated in computational systems. In neuroimaging, machine learning methods have been used to test computational models of sensory information processing. Recently, these model comparison techniques have been used to evaluate deep neural networks (DNNs) as models of sensory information processing. However, the interpretation of such model evaluations is muddied by imprecise statistical conclusions. Here, we make explicit the types of conclusions that can be drawn from these existing model comparison techniques and how these conclusions change when the model in question is a DNN. We discuss how DNNs are amenable to new model comparison techniques that allow for stronger conclusions to be made about the computational mechanisms underlying sensory information processing.