Comp Music Lab

Welcome to our lab!

Welcome to the CompMusic Lab for comparative and computational musicology! We study the science of the world's music with the aim of promoting cross-cultural diversity and understanding.

Our work has received awards from organizations including the Society for Music Perception and Cognition; Cultural Evolution Society; International Society for Music Information Retrieval; Association for Psychological Science; Japanese Minister for Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology; Royal Society Te Apārangi; and the Japanese Emperor.

For an accessible introduction to our research, check out the following:

Our Oxford University Press chapter on the controversial history of comparative musicology, including our proposed best practices to improve the field's poor track record in diversity, equity, and inclusion, and attempts to implement them via a global collaboration with over 80 coauthors.
This Nautilus piece on music and biological evolution, universals, and social bonding featuring our articles in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and the SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture alongside other leading scholars and musicians around the world.
This Discover Magazine piece about the cultural evolution of music featuring our articles in Current Biology and Evolution and Human Behavior alongside other leading scholars.
This New York Times piece about the Global Jukebox, where you can listen to and analyze over 5,000 songs from around 1,000 societies around the world that have been coded using Cantometrics (details in our articles in PLOS ONE and Music & Science).
Our MUTEK keynote lecture/concert "Hearing Music Evolve", which includes our live performances of traditional Japanese, Ainu, and Amami Island music that are then remixed with samples from music around the world (The HU, Sonah Jobarteh, Baka Gbiné, Timbaland, and Queen).
This Royal Society Te Apārangi press release about our Rutherford Discovery Fellowship project exploring global diversity in music-language relationships (Stage 1 protocol Accepted In Principle at Peer Community In Registered Reports).

If you are interested in applying to join the lab, please email our director, Patrick Savage, including a CV, academic transcript, and short (<500-word) description of your research interests and how they fit with the lab. We encourage applicants from all backgrounds – especially from historically underrepresented groups. Please read through our lab manual to get a sense of what life in our lab is like and what our expectations are for potential lab members, funding options, etc.

For more about who we are and what we do, please see our "Members" and "Publications" pages.