ArticleNature communications2024
Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Cultural evolution - of the arts.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- State formation across cultures and the role of grain, intensive agriculture, taxation and writing.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- The analysis of bidirectional long short-term memory network model for construction of cultural gene map and information extraction.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Exploring factors for melodic diversification of folk songs in the Ryukyu Archipelago.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Contrasting modes of cultural evolution: Kra-Dai languages and weaving technologies.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Appreciation of singing and speaking voices is highly idiosyncratic.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech: A Registered Report.Science advances · 2024Article
- Group singing is globally dominant and associated with social context.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- The Exceptions and the Rules in Global Musical Diversity.Journal of cognition · 2023Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Music is a universal yet diverse cultural trait transmitted between generations. The extent to which global musical diversity traces cultural and demographic history, however, is unresolved. Using a global musical dataset of 5242 songs from 719 societies, we identify five axes of musical diversity and show that music contains geographical and historical structures analogous to linguistic and genetic diversity. After creating a matched dataset of musical, genetic, and linguistic data spanning 121 societies containing 981 songs, 1296 individual genetic profiles, and 121 languages, we show that global musical similarities are only weakly and inconsistently related to linguistic or genetic histories, with some regional exceptions such as within Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Our results suggest that global musical traditions are largely distinct from some non-musical aspects of human history.
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