{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/convergent-evolution-in-a-large-cross","title":"Convergent evolution in a large cross-cultural database of musical scales","arxiv_id":"2108.00842","date":"2021-07-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["John M McBride","Sam Passmore","Tsvi Tlusty"],"abstract":"Scales, sets of discrete pitches that form the basis of melodies, are thought to be one of the most universal hallmarks of music. But we know relatively little about cross-cultural diversity of scales or how they evolved. To remedy this, we assemble a cross-cultural database (Database of Musical Scales: DaMuSc) of scale data, collected over the past century by various ethnomusicologists. Statistical analyses of the data highlight that certain intervals (e.g., the octave, fifth, second) are used frequently across cultures. Despite some diversity among scales, it is the similarities across societies which are most striking - most scales are found close to equidistant 5- and 7-note scales. We discuss the mechanisms of variation and selection in the evolution of scales, and how the assembled data may be used to examine the root causes of convergent evolution.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.00842v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.00842v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"convergent-evolution-in-a-large-cross","repo_url":"https://github.com/jomimc/damusc","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"convergent-evolution-in-a-large-cross","repo_url":"https://github.com/jomimc/damusc_paper_code","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}