Dear colleagues,
Manvir Singh, Luke Glowacki, and I are delighted to officially announce the Natural History of Song! We've just launched our website at http://www.naturalhistoryofsong.org. I've posted about this project a few times on Auditory and we are now going public.
In the project, we collect ethnographic text and audio recordings from many cultures and use them to determine the behavioral, social, acoustical, and musical features that characterize the world's songs. We aim to provide a public resource that advances the scientific and humanistic study of music.
We'd love to discuss with anyone who is interested, especially if there are particular questions that you'd like to explore or experiments you'd like to run using the datasets. The data and materials will soon be made open-access, so this could be either on your own, or in collaboration with one or more people on our team.
We are also recruiting musicians, music theorists, ethnomusicologists, and/or anyone with basic training in music who is interested in volunteering to help gather data from the audio recordings and transcriptions used in the project. If you or one of your students might be interested, please check out the website and contact us if you’d like to join the team.
Looking forward to discussing the project with any/all who are interested!
best,
Samuel Mehr, Director
Manvir Singh, Co-Director
Luke Glowacki, Co-Director
The Natural History of Song
naturalhistoryofsong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
naturalhistoryofsong.org
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Samuel Mehr
Presidential Scholar, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Affiliate, Lab for Developmental Studies + Evolutionary Psychology Lab
1136 William James Hall // (617) 384-9093 // mehr.cz