Public peer review of “A natural history of song” / “Universality and diversity in human song” (Mehr et al., 2019)

This is a public version of my peer review of “A natural history of song” (later published as “Universality and diversity in human song”; Mehr et al., 2019). I commended the novelty of the analyses of musical behavior and recommended publication after addressing various issues. The final published revision addressed some of these issues, including making the title more informative and adding data about the reliability of their Western staff notation transcriptions. However, several core criticisms remained incompletely addressed, including situating the results with respect to previous comparative musicological findings, controlling for non-independence of societies (autocorrelation), and defining “music” and “universal”.