Abstract
This study introduces and evaluates a new methodology for cross-cultural ethnomusicological analysis of symbolic music. We investigate music similarity in popular traditions rooted in oral transmission by identifying shared patterns at scale across multiple hierarchies. The novelty of our approach lies in expanding musical similarity phyloanalysis-typically adopting alignment metrics that compare entire scores-to structurally aware phrases and macrostructure (i.e., form) alignment. Additionally, we explore patterns derived from multiple representations (chromatic interval, diatonic interval, rhythmic ratios, and a combination of them) to facilitate the exploration of stylistic affinities across musical genres and traditions. Our method is tested on a new dataset of 600 Galician and Irish popular music scores, which includes expert annotations for 21 genres (four shared between the two traditions) and detailed phrase information, all made available as open-access data. We use the genre separation ratio to examine how alignment strategies capture stylistic structure, providing insights that support musicological exploration across genres and traditions. The resulting phylogenetic trees and distance matrices reveal relationships among traditions, genres, and scores, facilitating the exploration of cross-cultural influences and enabling the identification of shared patterns at multiple hierarchies. © 2025, International Society for Music Information Retrieval. All rights reserved.

Abstract