The deep history of music project

Music, like language and genes, is the product of a descent-by-modification process. As such, the current distribution of music styles around the world should reflect the history of human migration and cultural diffusion (Lomax, 1968). However, where geneticists and linguists have developed sophisticated techniques for reconstructing that history, ethnomusicologist have largely abandoned large-scale comparative studies. here we outline a proposal to revive comparative musicology using recent digitized ethnomusicological archives and MIR technology. Our study has three objectives: (i) To determine global distribution of musical style; (ii) to investigate the relationship between patterns of musical, linguistic and genetic diversity; (iii) to construct a large open-access database containing MIR features and metadata from traditional music