Goal

Artistic expression is a defining aspect of humanity deeply linked to Foundation priorities of creativity, well-being, and spirituality, yet has received relatively little scientific attention or funding. By bonding individuals together and linking them to the beliefs, rituals, and lived experiences of their ancestors, the arts may facilitate cooperative, flourishing societies.
The arts have largely been studied through a Western framework emphasizing novel creations by lone geniuses: Beethoven, Shakespeare, Picasso, etc. Yet in many cultures, the role of communities in preserving their intangible cultural heritage is equally or more important. A unified understanding of artistic creativity calls for an inclusive perspective that values both novelty and continuity. Cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural research combining perspectives of culture-bearers and research from the arts, anthropology, evolutionary biology, cultural evolution, history, archaeology, psychology, economics, and genetics could answer questions such as:
-How and why did the arts coevolve with domains such as language and religion?
-How do artists and communities consciously and unconsciously balance tradition and innovation?
-How do the arts bring individuals into synchrony and facilitate cooperation?
-How can we incentivize preserving artistic tradition and creating new art?
-Can the value of the arts to human flourishing be quantified and applied to economic policy?

Opportunity

The proposed research would complement recent Templeton-funded cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural research on the cultural and biological evolution of cooperation [1], religion, and language, renewing an initiative to create a unified cross-cultural science of the arts [2]. This initiative stalled, but has recently been reinvigorated [3-5], particularly in the domain of music [6,7]. A multi-decade effort to digitize thousands of global recordings of audio, dance, and other expressive arts planned to be made publicly available before the end of the year [8] could provide necessary data to expand this revival beyond music to other domains of the arts.

Roadblocks

Historically, this field has struggled to develop a unified approach to diverse art forms. Indeed, there is yet no single field of "artsology": establishing one is the goal of this proposal. Historical roadblocks to its establishment have been:
-lack of shared terminology due to cultural divides between scientists, humanists, and artistic practitioners
-lack of cross-cultural data in forms amenable to comparative analysis due to methodological differences and limitations in open science data sharing practices
-lack of diversity due to legacies of colonialism/racism
-lack of funding for scientific study of artistic creativity

Breakthroughs Needed

Inclusive collaborations will be needed to overcome all of the Roadblocks above and create a unified science of the arts by:
-creating a new nexus for the community, (e.g., conference, summer school). Symposia and workshops that bring diverse stakeholders together in the EARLY stages of large research projects to agree on standards have the potential to avoid mistakes, misunderstandings, and feelings of lack of engagement and inclusion. They can also help to ensure agreement on shared standards and best-practices including standards for recording, archiving, and sharing data and for collaborative coauthored publication in venues that will reach the diverse audiences [cf. 7 & 10].
-agreeing on shared methodologies for collecting, analyzing, and sharing cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary data: something along the lines of public databases in fields like linguistics or anthropology [8,9].
-Proactively recruiting diverse stakeholders from under-represented groups to participate as equal collaborators and/or project leaders from the beginning.
-developing a series of grant funding covering a range (e.g., pilot, medium grant, Grand Challenge) that allows diverse opportunities for a large number of diverse stakeholders and allows us to select a small number of high-quality projects to focus investment on later on.

Key Indicators of Success

3 years: Are the conferences/workshops/symposia/summer schools well attended? Did the call for proposals for exploratory grants lead to competitive projects? (Any 'no' answer would indicate a failure).
5 years: Did the exploratory grants lead to new research ideas for interdisciplinary projects? Did the Grand Challenges call result in strong proposals?
10 years: Is there a self-sustaining community? Did any of the grants lead to new useful discoveries? ('Yes' to both would indicate success but a 'no' may not necessarily be a failure.)

Additional Information

Potential collaborators:
Steven Brown (http://neuroarts.org)
Salwa El-Sawan Castelo-Branco (http://www.inetmd.pt/index.php/en/people/doutoradosen/299-salwa-el-shawan-castelo-branco-en)
Carol Ember (https://hraf.yale.edu/about/staff/carol-r-ember)
Nori Jacoby (https://www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/the-institute/people/nori-jacoby.html)
Hideaki Kawabata (https://psy.flet.keio.ac.jp/english/staff/kawabata.html)
Kate Kirby (https://www.shh.mpg.de/person/93685/25522)
Elizabeth Margulis (https://music.princeton.edu/people/elizabeth-hellmuth-margulis-0)
Patricia Opondo (https://soa.ukzn.ac.za/staff-profile/music/patricia-opondo)
Forrestine Paulay (http://www.culturalequity.org/alan-lomax/friends/paulay)
Anna Lomax Wood (https://web.archive.org/web/20120525023447/http://culturalequity.org/ace/ce_ace_staff_anna_lomax_wood.php)

References:
[1] Botero, C. A., Gardner, B., Kirby, K. R., Bulbulia, J., Gavin, M. C., & Gray, R. D. (2014). The ecology of religious beliefs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(47), 16784–16789. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1408701111
[2] Lomax, A. (1968). Folk song style and culture. American Association for the Advancement of Science.
[3] Brown, S. (2018). Toward a unification of the arts. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1938. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01938
[4] Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. https://www.aesthetics.mpg.de/index.php?id=1535&L=1
[5] First symposium of the International Council for Traditional Music Study Group on Sound, Movement, and the Sciences. http://www.ictmusic.org/group/ictm-study-group-sound-movement-and-sciences/post/first-symposium-ictm-study-group-sound
[6] Savage, P. E., Loui, P., Tarr, B., Schachner, A., Glowacki, L., Mithen, S., & Fitch, W. T. (2020). Music as a coevolved system for social bonding. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X20000333
[7] Jacoby, N., Margulis, E., Clayton, M., Hannon, E., Honing, H., Iversen, J., Klein, T. R., London, J., Mehr, S., Pearson, L., Peretz, I., Perlman, M., Polak, R., Ravignani, A., Savage, P. E., Steingo, G., Stevens, C., Trainor, L., Trehub, S., Veal, M., & Wald-Fuhrmann, M. (2020). Cross-cultural work in music cognition: Methodologies, pitfalls, and practices. Music Perception, 37(3), 185–195. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2020.37.3.185
[8] Wood, A. L. C., Kirby, K. R., Ember, C. R., Silbert, S., Daikoku, H., Paulay, F., Grauer, V., Flory, M., Rifkin, J., D'Arcangelo, G., Szinger, J., Federsen, J., Smith-Archiapatti, K., Atayeva, M., Baron, V., Bradley, K. K., Elhajli, M., Guarino, M. F., Smith, R., Szinger, M., & Savage, P. E. (In prep.). The Global Jukebox: An interactive database of the expressive arts and culture. http://theglobaljukebox.org [PsyArXiv preprint planned before end of year]
[9] Kirby, K. R., Gray, R. D., Greenhill, S. J., Jordan, F. M., Gomes-Ng, S., Bibiko, H.-J., Blasi, D. E., Botero, C. A., Bowern, C., Ember, C. R., Leehr, D., Low, B. S., McCarter, J., Divale, W., & Gavin, M. C. (2016). D-PLACE: A global database of cultural, linguistic and environmental diversity. PLOS ONE, 11(7), e0158391. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0158391
[10] Margulis, L., Jacoby, N. & Savage, P. E. (organizers) Symposium on "Building sustainable global collaborative research networks" (Max Planck - NYU Center for Language, Music and Emotion, NYC, USA). https://www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/research/research-group-computational-auditory-perception/events/events-rg-cap-detailseiten/article/784b92aae1df7360077b7314aa95ec09.html