  The music of Northern Myanmar Kachin ethnic group is compared to the music of
western China, Xijiang based Uyghur music, using timbre and pitch feature
extraction and machine learning. Although separated by Tibet, the muqam
tradition of Xinjiang might be found in Kachin music due to myths of Kachin
origin, as well as linguistic similarities, e.g., the Kachin term 'makan' for a
musical piece. Extractions were performed using the apollon and COMSAR
(Computational Music and Sound Archiving) frameworks, on which the Ethnographic
Sound Recordings Archive (ESRA) is based, using ethnographic recordings from
ESRA next to additional pieces. In terms of pitch, tonal systems were compared
using Kohonen self-organizing map (SOM), which clearly clusters Kachin and
Uyghur musical pieces. This is mainly caused by the Xinjiang muqam music
showing just fifth and fourth, while Kachin pieces tend to have a higher fifth
and fourth, next to other dissimilarities. Also, the timbre features of
spectral centroid and spectral sharpness standard deviation clearly tells
Uyghur from Kachin pieces, where Uyghur music shows much larger deviations.
Although more features will be compared in the future, like rhythm or melody,
these already strong findings might introduce an alternative comparison
methodology of ethnic groups beyond traditional linguistic definitions.
