The spatial mechanisms of soundscapes in intangible cultural heritage (ICH) are crucial for achieving living transmission. Focusing on traditional folk song soundscapes in Jilin Province, this paper introduces the concept of “soundscape genes” as the core analytical unit and develops a GeoDetector-CatBoost-SHAP geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) framework for quantitative analysis. The research findings indicate that the distribution of work songs (haozi) is jointly influenced by an ecological threshold of precipitation exceeding 700 mm and agricultural cultural practices. Mountain songs (shange) typically form cultural-ecological isolation zones in settlements receiving less than 680 millimeters of rainfall and located more than 150 km from villages. For lyric folk songs (xiaodiao), proximity to sociocultural nodes is positively associated within 25 km and negatively associated between 25 and 55 km. These precise geographic thresholds contribute to advancing local intangible cultural heritage protection models from “static preservation” to “dynamic adaptation”.
Fan et al. (Wed,) studied this question.