Music tastes vary drastically – thank goodness for AirPods – but it turns out music preference is a bit like genetics, we inherit it from our parents.

A new study from the Australian National University has found that looking at our musical past could hold important clues about our culture and who we are as humans (I wonder what my parents’ Nana Mouskouri record collection says about me).

Lead author Dr Sam Passmore, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the ANU School of Culture, History and Language, said much like our genes and language, songs are often passed down from generation to generation.  

“Our parents sing songs to us, we sing those songs to our children, and them to theirs, creating a chain of inheritance and a preference for the musical styles we are accustomed to, such as particular rhythms or types of singing,” Dr Passmore said.

Dr Passmore has a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. He listens to a “global jukebox” (online database of more than 5,000 songs) to study how music reveals new information about our cultural past and how songs sing to us over multiple generations.   

“Our study shows that music is another domain that can tell us interesting stories and add new threads to our view of human history. In theory, anything reliably inherited between generations records something about the past.  

“Sometimes we see the histories from different disciplines align, providing us with confidence about a series of events, and sometimes they do not align, identifying interesting divergence points in our past.”  

Dr Passmore linked songs to social organisation, to identify the structure of musical diversity. They found that similar music styles were bound by geographic distance, as well as containing historical signals.   

“What we learnt is that musical history often diverges from language and genetic history and that it may be more aligned with other markers such as social organisation,” Dr Passmore said.  

“We can see there is a strong link between the expansion of Bantu languages and the call-and-response style of singing in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the chanted singing style of the Pacific, which has spread alongside the spread of Austronesian languages in the Pacific. 

“Our findings tell us more about the role of music in human society. It’s clear it’s more complex than it might appear at first glance.” 

Taylor Swift fever may be felt for generations to come no matter how hard we shake it off.