The Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, a global corpus of vocal music

A comprehensive cognitive science requires broad sampling of human behavior to justify general inferences about the mind. For example, the field of psycholinguistics relies on a rich history of comparative study, with many available resources that systematically document many languages. Surprisingly, despite a longstanding interest in questions of universality and diversity, the psychology of music has few such resources. Here, we report the Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, an open-access corpus of vocal music (n = 1007 song excerpts), with accompanying metadata detailing each song’s region of origin, language (of 413 languages represented here), and one of 10 behavioral contexts (e.g., work, storytelling, mourning, lullaby, dance). The corpus is designed to sample both broadly, with a large cross-section of societies and languages; and deeply, with many songs representing three well-studied language families (Atlantic-Congo, Austronesian, and Indo-European). This design facilitates direct comparison of musical and vocal features across cultures, principled approaches to sampling stimuli for experiments, and evaluation of models of the cultural evolution of song. In this paper we describe the corpus and provide two proofs of concept, demonstrating its utility. We show that (1) the acoustical forms of songs are predictive of their behavioral contexts, including in previously unstudied contexts (e.g., children’s play songs); and (2) similarities in acoustic content of songs across cultures are predictable, in part, by the relatedness of those cultures.