bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/649459; this version posted May 24, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. This article is a US Government work. It is not subject to copyright under 17 USC 105 and is also made available for use under a CC0 license. A definition of song from human music universals observed in primate calls David Schruth1*, Christopher N. Templeton2, Darryl J. Holman1 1 Department of Anthropology, University of Washington 2 Department of Biology, Pacific University *Corresponding author,
[email protected] bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/649459; this version posted May 24, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. This article is a US Government work. It is not subject to copyright under 17 USC 105 and is also made available for use under a CC0 license. Abstract Musical behavior is likely as old as our species with song originating as early as 60 million years ago in the primate order. Early singing likely evolved into the music of modern humans via multiple selective events, but efforts to disentangle these influences have been stifled by challenges to precisely define this behavior in a broadly applicable way. Detailed here is a method to quantify the elaborateness of acoustic displays using published spectrograms (n=832 calls) culled from the literature on primate vocalizations. Each spectrogram was scored by five trained analysts via visual assessments along six musically relevant acoustic parameters: tone, interval, transposition, repetition, rhythm, and syllabic variation.