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Signaling games and music as a credible signal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2021

Massimo Lumaca
Affiliation:
Department of Clinical Medicine, Center for Music in the Brain, Aarhus University & The Royal Academy of Music Aarhus/Aalborg, 8000Aarhus, [email protected]; [email protected]
Elvira Brattico
Affiliation:
Department of Clinical Medicine, Center for Music in the Brain, Aarhus University & The Royal Academy of Music Aarhus/Aalborg, 8000Aarhus, [email protected]; [email protected]
Giosuè Baggio
Affiliation:
Language Acquisition and Language Processing Lab, Department of Language and Literature, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7941Trondheim, Norway. [email protected]

Abstract

The argument by Mehr et al. that music emerged and evolved culturally as a credible signal is convincing, but it lacks one essential ingredient: a model of signaling behavior that supports the main hypothesis theoretically and empirically. We argue that signaling games can help us explain how musical structures emerge as population-level phenomena, through sender–receiver signaling interactions.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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