Musical Evolution and Human Migration: Classification, Quantification, and Application

Abstract

<p>The cross-cultural study of music is important to our understanding of the evolution of human biological and cultural diversity. Early comparative musicologists failed to develop rigorous scientific methods for studying this, and the modern-day fields of music cognition and ethnomusicology still lack such methods. In this thesis, I describe our attempts to design new methods for classifying and quantifying cross-cultural musical diversity and to apply these methods to the study of musical evolution and migration. Using a new method of classifying songs, we analyzed 421 songs from 16 indigenous tribes in Taiwan and the Philippines. We found striking parallels between musical and genetic diversity, both in the degree of diversity found within each culture and in the patterns of similarities between cultures. These findings suggest that music may be subject to similar processes of evolution and migration as are genes. A new, multidisciplinary, and scientifically-grounded comparative musicology may thus provide a new line of evidence to complement and integrate existing research into the complex relationship between music, biology, and culture.</p>