Utilizing The Global Jukebox - an online database of more than 5,000 songs - the study demonstrates music's unique ability to uncover new information about our cultural past and how songs are transmitted across generations.
Lead author Dr. Sam Passmore, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the ANU School of Culture, History and Language, explained that songs, much like genes and language, are often passed down from one generation to the next.
"Our parents sing songs to us, we sing those songs to our children, and them to theirs, creating a chain of inheritance and a preference for the musical styles we are accustomed to, such as particular rhythms or types of singing," he said.
"Our study shows that music is another domain that can tell us interesting stories and add new threads to our view of human history.
"In theory, anything reliably inherited between generations records something about the past.
"Sometimes we see the histories from different disciplines align, providing us with confidence about a series of events, and sometimes they do not align, identifying interesting divergence points in our past."
Dr. Passmore and his team used 'cantometric' descriptions - a method of linking songs to social organization - to identify the structure of musical diversity. This revealed that similarity found in musical style is influenced by geographic distance and contains historical signals.
"What we learnt is that musical history often diverges from language and genetic history and that it may be more aligned with other markers such as social organization," Dr. Passmore said.
"We can see there is a strong link between the expansion of Bantu languages and the call-and-response style of singing in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the chanted singing style of the Pacific, which has spread alongside the spread of Austronesian languages in the Pacific.
"Our findings tell us more about the role of music in human society. It's clear it's more complex than it might appear at first glance."
This study was a collaboration between ANU, Keio University, The University of Auckland, The University of Zurich, Tel Aviv University, and the Association for Cultural Equity.
Research Report:Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories
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