This is Scientific Americans, 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Huckin.

You're probably familiar with the concept of evolution.

Living things evolved by accumulating genetic changes, which are then weeded out or preserved

through a process of natural selection. Well, it turns out, the same thing happens in music.

And by using the same software that's used to track mutations in genes,

researchers have mapped out the sorts of changes that shape the evolution of songs.

The findings appear in the journal Current Biology.

I've always loved music since I was a child.

Patrick Savage, an ethno-musicologist at KO University in Fujisawa, Japan.

I grew up singing English folk songs. My dad really likes folk music

and often has his friends come over and do jam sessions at home.

And then when I moved to Japan about 11 years ago, I started studying Japanese folk songs.

And I really, really like that repertoire too.

The style was very different from the music he grew up with.

It's like...

Yet the way the songs are learned by trying to imitate a recording or a teacher is pretty much the same.

So it kind of made sense to test these ideas about all these general evolutionary rules that we find in music,

especially in these folk songs, repertoire as I know, that we kind of parallel we find in genetics

and allow us to get a more sort of general unifying theory about music and evolution across different cultures.

At first, he and his colleagues hoped to tackle a huge reconstruction of the family tree of all folk music.

But kind of quickly realized that it would be quite challenging to do,

because when you do when you build these phylogenies, these family trees,

...