The structure of cross-cultural musical diversity

TLDR

Human cultural traits such as language, music, rituals, and material objects vary widely, yet comparative studies usually focus on between‑culture differences, whereas biological methods like AMOVA partition diversity into within‑ and between‑population components. The study aims to quantify within‑ and between‑population components of musical diversity using the AMOVA model. Using 421 traditional songs from 16 Austronesian‑speaking populations, the authors applied AMOVA and neighbor‑net analysis, revealing that most musical variation is within populations and that reticulation indicates widespread borrowing or convergent evolution. The analysis shows that most musical variation is within populations, paralleling human genetic diversity, and that extensive reticulation indicates widespread borrowing or convergent evolution across populations.

Abstract

Human cultural traits, such as languages, musics, rituals and material objects, vary widely across cultures. However, the majority of comparative analyses of human cultural diversity focus on between-culture variation without consideration for within-culture variation. In contrast, biological approaches to genetic diversity, such as the analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) framework, partition genetic diversity into both within- and between-population components. We attempt here for the first time to quantify both components of cultural diversity by applying the AMOVA model to music. By employing this approach with 421 traditional songs from 16 Austronesian-speaking populations, we show that the vast majority of musical variability is due to differences within populations rather than differences between. This demonstrates a striking parallel to the structure of genetic diversity in humans. A neighbour-net analysis of pairwise population musical divergence shows a large amount of reticulation, indicating the pervasive occurrence of borrowing and/or convergent evolution of musical features across populations.