Musicologists have long studied how musical styles change over time. They can see that new styles emerge from musical traditions, sometimes by combining two or more styles.
That brings to mind the process of evolution. Is it possible that this powerful process has shaped the musical landscape using the same well-known laws of transmission that shape the biological landscape? Or is it just that musical evolution is the result of the idiosyncratic behavior of composers and so defies more general characterization?
Today we get an answer, in part thanks to the work of Eita Nakamura at Kyoto University and Kunihiko Kaneko at the University of Tokyo. They have carried out a large-scale study of Western classical music and say it reveals for the first time a number of evolutionary laws at work. Their results have implications for the understanding of other cultural phenomena, such as the evolution of language, fashion, and science.
