Abstract
We present a hypothesis-driven study on the variation of melody phrases in a collection of Dutch folk songs. We investigate the variation of phrases within the folk songs through a pattern matching method which detects occurrences of these phrases within folk song variants, and ask the question: do the phrases which show less variation have different properties than those which do? We hypothesize that theories on melody recall may predict variation, and as such, investigate phrase length, the position and number of repetitions of a given phrase in the melody in which it occurs, as well as expectancy and motif repetivity. We show that all of these predictors account for the observed variation to a moderate degree, and that, as hypothesized, those phrases vary less which are rather short, contain highly expected melodic material, occur relatively early in the melody, and contain small pitch intervals. A large portion of the variance is left unexplained by the current model, however, which leads us to a discussion of future approaches to study memorability of melodies.
Highlights
Songs and instrumental pieces in a musical tradition are subject to change: as they are adopted by a new generation of listeners and musicians, they evolve into something new while retaining some of their original characteristics
We focus on melodic phrases from the folk songs and employ a novel pattern matching method to determine whether or not a match for a given phrase may be found in a given folk song variant, based on similarity measures tested in Music Information Retrieval, and evaluated on a subset of folk songs in previous work (Janssen et al, in press)
Our results show that the strongest model for the stability of melodic phrases is the full model with all independent variables: phrase length, phrase repetition, phrase position, pitch proximity, pitch reversal, surprisal and motif repetivity
Summary
Songs and instrumental pieces in a musical tradition are subject to change: as they are adopted by a new generation of listeners and musicians, they evolve into something new while retaining some of their original characteristics. The current article investigates to what extent this change of melodies may be explained by hypotheses on the memorability of melodies. To address this question, we investigate a corpus of folk songs collected in the second half of the twentieth century, in which we can identify groups of variants. There is a long-standing interest in those melodic segments which resist change during melody transmission. This resistance to change is referred to as stability (Bronson, 1951)
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