Drum Experiment Reveals Clues On Cultural Evolution

A new study illustrates the influence of environmental constraints on the evolution of cultural practices - with drums.

According to Helena Miton, a Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow from the Santa Fe Institute, environmental factors - like the physical space or what materials are naturally available - play a role in the development of certain cultural traits. Miton adds that while researchers have acknowledged this possibility, there has never been an explicit inquiry about its effects, more so in an experimental context.

In an attempt to observe these environmental influences on culture, Miton and her team designed a series of experiments with three identical drums and more than 100 participants. Their study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, aims to describe the influence of material availability on cultural evolution.

Tracing the Evolution of Rhythm

In a press release from Santa Fe, Miton explains that she chose the investigative topic because of the apparent dependence of musical instruments on material constraints. The natural materials native to a community is a factor in what kinds of instruments they can create, which in turn affect the kind of sounds they will create.

"We wanted to have an experiment that was as simple as possible," Miton explains. The study included 120 participants - none of them had prior music education - to join an experimental setup based on the children's game "Telephone." In the game, children form a line or a circle, with the first player relaying a message to the player next, and so on, until the last player announces the message. Miton explains that these games, called transmission chains, are usually used in experiments to emulate cultural communications.

Researchers grouped the participants into six-man chains. The first participant listened to a sequence of beats played on the three identical drums, and then asked to play the rhythm they heard. The researchers then observed the changes in these sounds as they are passed from one person to another.

Some groups were asked to replicate rhythms with drums placed next to each other, while others had their drums separated by greater distances. Other chains were asked to replicate rhythms on drums in a mix of close and far-spaced drums.

Transforming Sounds in a Predictable Way

"People transform what they heard in a very systematic, rather than random, way," said Dan Sperber, a cognitive scientist from the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary and a part of the study. He explained that they were able to predict the changes that will occur on the drum-beat rhythms. In fact, researchers correctly hypothesized that the drum beats differed from the original rhythm, even the behavior of each drum set configuration.

Miton called their work a "proof of concept experiment" that shows how different environments actually cause the emergence of different cultural patterns. She stressed that the takeaway in the study is that it is actually possible to "parse out ecological and psychological factors."

Listen to one of the initial "seed" drum beats, as heard by the "first generation" participants in the study, and compare it to one of the "sixth-generation" sounds as performed by the latter participants.