In two recent studies, researchers have found clues to suggest that the link between music and language is not entirely straightforward.compared songs and speech from different global cultures. Yuto Ozaki and Patrick Savage from Keio University in Japan collaborated with a large international research team to analyze recordings of songs, melodies and speech from over 50 languages around the world.
Savage himself represented the English language with the song “Scarborough Fair”, while Ozaki sang “Ōmori Jinku”, a Japanese folk song from the Tokyo area. The many other researchers involved in the study contributed recordings in Māori, Yoruba, Cherokee, Hebrew, Mandarin, Arabic and several other languages.
Genetics and language analysis are often used to study how human societies evolved and spread across the world. For example, cultures that diverged more recently will have languages that are more similar to each other than cultures that split from each other much longer ago.