Under the background of globalization and multicultural coexistence, the construction of cultural community has become an important path to promote the inheritance and innovation of national culture. This paper takes ethnic music cultural exchange as the research object, and proposes a shortest path model based on the Improved Approximate Neighbor Propagation (IAP) algorithm to optimize the efficiency and structure of cultural communication. The study quantifies the interaction characteristics of nodes and the propagation law by constructing a complex network of ethnic music and cultural communication, and the IAP algorithm solves the limitations of noise interference and modularity resolution to realize the optimization of cultural communication paths. Experiments show that the IAP algorithm has better influence diffusion ability under the DWA model, and the final calculation of influence diffusion in the three datasets is higher than that of the Forward algorithm by 3.4%, 2.6%, and 2.7%, respectively, and the actual number of activated nodes is improved by 3.4%, 3.4%, and 2.5%, respectively. The improved IAP algorithm is used to optimize the network influence problem, and the average shortest path length is only 1508.77 when G=2000, which provides theoretical support and practical solutions for the universal communication and cross-regional mutual appreciation of ethnic music culture.
