Thanks to the support of the Keio University Academic Development Funds for Individual Research, we were able to successfully carry out our proposed research, publish 9 original research papers, and give 22 presentations at international conferences (all virtual due to COVID-19).

Specifically, the fund allowed us to pay for student part-time work to undertake research and to present and publish our research findings at international journals and conferences such as Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Current Biology, the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, and the Cultural Evolution Society World Conference.

Our major findings were that there is both substantial cross-cultural variation and cross-cultural universals in music perception and production, and that social bonding is a unifying factor that shapes this cross-cultural diversity and universality. We obtained these findings using new methods from computer science and cognitive science to analyze and compare music from around the world. In the future we hope to build on these results to apply these techniques at larger scales to tackle challenges such as automatic music recommendation and understanding global variation in music perception and production. We are grateful for the financial support of the Keio University Academic Development Funds for Individual Research.