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 22 original research papers in journals, conference proceedings and edited volumes, and give 13 presentations at international conferences.
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 Nature Reviews Neuroscience, PLOS ONE, the International Council for Traditional Music, the Folk Music Analysis International Workshop, Joint Conference on Langauge Evolution, the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, and the Cultural Evolution Society World Conference, and to try the new Peer Community In Registered Reports approach to open science.
Our major findings were that there is both substantial cross-cultural variation and cross-cultural universals in music perception and production, and that musical diversity is related to diversity in other domains including language and visual processing. 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.