Contrasting statistical patterns in melodic and molecular evolution reveal distinctive constraints in a culturally evolving system

Evolved sequences can be used to infer the rules of evolution. Orally transmitted folk melodies are evolved sequences whose similarity to protein sequences (one-dimensional, drawn from a limited alphabet) invites application of bioinformatics methods to study cultural evolution. A major obstacle is that melodies encode rhythm, which breaks some assumptions of standard sequence-alignment algorithms. We develop a rhythm-aware alignment method and apply it to \num{40000} Irish dance tune variants, enabling the first large-scale automated melodic alignment. Four canonical bioinformatics analyses – mutability, substitution matrices, positional conservation, and covariance – reveal patterns distinct from those of molecular evolution, revealing the forces that shape each domain: biochemical and biophysical constraints for proteins; memory, motor, and social biases for melodies. Together the results show that bioinformatics provides a powerful framework – conceptual as much as algorithmic – for studying cultural evolution. Although the cultural transmission of music has been discussed for centuries, here we show how to analyze it at large scale.