Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University, Fujisawa, Japan.
Evolution of Cultural Diversity Initiative (ECDI), Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
Nat Commun. 2024 May 10;15(1):3964. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-48113-7.
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.
音乐是一种世代相传的普遍而多样的文化特征。然而，全球音乐多样性在多大程度上反映了文化和人口历史，这一点尚未得到解决。我们使用来自 719 个社会的 5242 首歌曲的全球音乐数据集，确定了音乐多样性的五个轴，并表明音乐包含与语言和遗传多样性类似的地理和历史结构。在创建了一个包含 121 个社会的音乐、遗传和语言数据的匹配数据集后，该数据集包含 981 首歌曲、1296 个个体遗传特征和 121 种语言，我们表明全球音乐的相似性与语言或遗传历史的关系较弱且不一致，只有一些地区例外，如东南亚和撒哈拉以南非洲地区。我们的研究结果表明，全球音乐传统在很大程度上与人类历史的某些非音乐方面不同。
