Cultural evolution of music and language

Music and language are both forms of communication ubiquitously observed across human societies, prompting researchers to investigate why and how they evolved. While such research initially focused on the biological evolution of the capacities to create and perceive language and music, researchers increasingly emphasize the cultural evolution of language and music to study the mechanisms and processes driving the diversity and regularities of music and language. In this chapter, we aim to provide not only an overview and seminal studies of the cultural evolution of language and music (e.g. phylogenetic analysis of basic vocabulary, sequence alignment of melodies, rhythm transmission chain experiments) but also to contrast and synthesize both fields to highlight promising areas of future research. We group the literature by empirical/field studies, laboratory studies, simulation studies, and co-evolution. Furthermore, we propose key ideas that each discipline can learn from the other and promising research topics to encourage collaborative work between these two. We argue that integrating the emerging field of cultural evolution of music with the larger literature on language evolution will enrich our understanding of both music and language.