As people sing, so do they live

Working paper

Music is among the most pervasive forms of human expression and historically constituted a central component of social life across human societies. Yet, despite the growing recognition of culture as an important force shaping economic and social out comes, music has remained largely absent from empirical work in economics. This paper contributes to filling this gap by introducing a new source of cross-cultural data: the Cantometrics catalogue of traditional songs. This dataset contains information on the stylistic and structural characteristics of musical traditions across hundreds of indigenous societies worldwide, providing unusually broad and systematic coverage of expressive cultural variation across human societies. Combining Cantometrics with historical ethnographic data, I show that musical traits systematically predict ethnographic characteristics spanning social organization, economic practices, and political institutions. Moreover, societies that are closer in musical space are also closer in broader ethnographic space. These findings suggest that musical traditions co-evolve with other dimensions of culture and reflect deeper patterns of cultural variation across populations. Consistent with this interpretation, the paper further documents that ethnic homelands characterized by greater musical similarity exhibit substantially stronger contemporary social and economic connectedness. Taken together, the results illustrate the potential of traditional songs as measurable objects of economic analysis and suggest that cultural proximity plays an important role in shaping patterns of connectedness across subnational regions worldwide.

Authors: Crisostomo Wainstock, D

• Publication status: Published
• Publisher: University of Oxford
• Series: Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series
• Place of publication: Oxford
• Publication date: 2026-05-17
• Paper number: 1118
• Language: English
• Keywords: cultural evolution; connectedness; traditional songs; cultural distance