Melodies in transition
In the most comprehensive study to date on the cultural transmission of music, an international team has investigated how melodies change over time due to the influence of social, cultural and cognitive factors.
The team conducted singing experiments with around 1800 test subjects from India and North America. In order to simulate the development of music through oral tradition, they were asked to pass on a total of more than 3400 melodies from one person to the next by singing - similar to the children's game "Silent Mail". Over time, the singers made mistakes, so that the music developed more and more in the direction of appealing and easy-to-learn melodies.
According to the study, oral tradition has a profound impact on the development of music. Among other things, this can be seen in the emergence of various musical structures. Some of these structures could be observed across cultures, such as small pitch intervals or arch-shaped melodic contours - melodies that first rise in pitch and then fall again.
However, the study also revealed clear cultural differences: participants from North America tended to follow the cultural conventions of Western music when passing on the melodies, whereas in India, common Indian scales were preferred. Teams from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main, the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge were involved in the study.
More info:
Melodies in Transition - Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
