MOTIVATION


  • Cavalli-Sforza's The Great Human Diasporas (1995)

  • use of principal components analysis (PCA) to study distributions of genes that are easy to test in blood samples

  • musicologists have long been interested in music transmission and musical influence

    • e.g. Italian Medici; New Orleans jazz

  • techniques such as PCA could be applied to music

  • one of the best generalizations about culture is that it is geographically correlated