A computer-aided methodology for the analysis and classification of British-Canadian children's traditional singing games

Abstract

To structure a music education program in Canada based on the Hungarian model, Bartok's “grammatical principle” was adopted to define the musical characteristics of British-Canadian children's traditional songs. A computer-aided methodology analyzed a sample of singing games from a personal collection to identify 4-phrase variants, and extracted and tabulated by phrasal position their common phrase patterns of equal length. Future programs will complete the phrase analysis and analyze other musical characteristics, grouping variants successively to determine the styles of the entire collection.