In this study, the author empirically tests a formulation of Ellen Dissanayake's evolutionary theory of art, which argues that art evolved to promote group cohesion. The hypotheses derived from this theory and tested in this study specifically focus on ritual art and its relationships to various proxies for group cohesion such as community conflict and internal warfare. Results show that the presence of ritual art is significantly higher where certain measures of group cohesion are also higher (including lower internal warfare, lower conflict between communities of the same society, and lower frequency of violent conflict between groups within local communities).

Lullabies are often touted as universal to all human cultures, regardless of time and place. In order to test this axiom, this article examines all 186 societies in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, and codes them for the presence or absence of lullabies. The result ultimately hinges on the meaning of the word “lullaby”: when lullabies were defined as a strict and culturally conserved repertoire of songs sung to soothe infants, they were found to be neither a statistical nor even a “near” universal. However, when lullabies were defined as any type of singing used to soothe children, they were a near universal, with 96.8% of societies in the sample coded as having lullabies.

The authors develop CantoCore, an expansion of Lomax's Cantometrics scheme, in order to code for additional candidate musical universals. No musical feature occurs with absolute universality, but several features occur with statistically significant frequency after controlling for historical relatedness, and an additional set of features were found to be universally related to each other. The authors highlight the role of these features in human coordination and cohesion, as well as their their utility to the fields of musical cognition and evolution.

This chapter tests the influences of physiological stressors during infancy on different aspects of musical behavior. Findings suggest that songs in societies where infantile stress is practiced will be characterized by stronger accents and a wider range.

The present research investigates the theory of universality in form and function in human song in a sample of people from 60 countries listening to music from 86 mainly small-scale societies. The aims are to document whether people 1) identify the social function of a song solely on form, 2) demonstrate form-function inferences, 3) use contextual aspects to distinguish song functions, and 4) use musical features to differentiate song functions. The authors claim support for the universal perception of song form-function in music listeners.

This chapter examines the relationship between social cohesion (measured using variables like subsistence type, stable work teams, and settlement patterns) and musical cohesion. All hypotheses are supported.

A large-scale comparative study of folk songs around the world employing systematic measures (cantometrics). The aim was not just to describe variation but to test hypotheses about the relationships between song style and societal structures. Dance was also considered.

The authors examine musical diversity in India using cantometric data from 32 Indian societies with the goal of better understanding how music varies between and within cultures. They find very minor musical differences between language families, greater diversity between societies but within language families, and the most variation within societies.

This study explores the prevalence of group singing and its relationship with changes in social organization's participatory dynamics, precisely community size and social differentiation. The authors use two samples: 1) 5776 audio recordings from 1024 societies and 2) 4709 ethnographic texts from 60 societies. There is significant support that group singing is more prevalent than solo singing. The results also show that community size predicts group singing in only one of the samples (GJB). However, there is no significant support for social differentiation as a predictor of group singing.

This paper hypothesizes that cross-cultural variation in rhythm is related to variation in infant carrying practices. Suggestions are made regarding the psychological origin of rhythm as well as the function and importance of music in human experience.