Bioinformatics analyses of evolution in the tune families of similar folk songs from Macedonia

The comparative study of songs allows for deeper insights in the evolution of music. The ethnomusicological studies of folk songs from Macedonia provide a few examples of complex tune families and their respective song variants. This study uses data from 7 ethnomusicological studies about song variants, together with more variants from other publications, combining 60 melodies of Macedonian folk songs which share tune families and melodic similarities. One of the song examples is a Turkish folk song which shares a tune family with a Macedonian song. The bioinformatics analysis of phylogeny and evolution confirms and expands the cited studies’ results, showing similarity between various melodies shared by the same song and shared by different songs, as well as between tune families. The results offer a potential glimpse of the evolution and diversity of similar melodies in folk songs. The most conserved appear to be the ritual folk songs of the village Bituše, while more diversity and ‘genetic sharing’ appears in the various other songs, of which the pastoral types provide the most frequent and diverse examples. We analyze examples of songs sharing tune families, as well as tune families’ similarities, publishing the most complete variant collection of two famous Macedonian folk songs that share a tune family – the song about Šar Planina and Devojčinja guguvčinja.