Evolve a Band Name!

Edit:  The results are out!

Me and my band are looking for a new name.  It’s a tough decision: we need one that’s clear and catchy.  If only there was a process that took some names and made them more easily learnable.  Wait, what about Iterated Learning? (see Jame’s post for a summary)

Click here to participate in our Band Name experiment.  It takes about two minutes.

We took some band names, randomly generated from this site, and present them to you for a short amount of time.  You then have to remember them.  We pass the names you remember onto the next participant.  Yes, you could just add your own band names, but they won’t reach the end of the chain unless they’re memorable.  You can participate more than once, but not more than 10 times.

While the iterated learning experiment methodology originates with Kirby, Cornish & Smith (2008), this experiment has no mapping between signals and meanings, so is more similar to the experiments of Keelin Murray (e.g. here), Tessa Verhoef (e.g. Verhoef & de Boer, 2011, see here too) and Lili Fullerton (e.g. Fullerton, 2011).  These experiments also used music as the thing that is culturally transmitted.

I’ll post the results up once we get some.

Me and my band are hosting a night of musical comedy on the 30th of June in Edinburgh.  If you’d like to perform, get in touch.

References
Kirby, S., Cornish, H., & Smith, K. (2008). Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (31), 10681-10686 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0707835105

Tallerman, M. (2007). Did our ancestors speak a holistic protolanguage? Lingua, 117 (3), 579-604 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2005.05.004