Cross-cultural music cognition: cognitive methodology applied to North Sami yoiks

Abstract

This article is a study of melodic expectancy in North Sami yoiks, a style of music quite distinct from Western tonal music. Three different approaches were taken. The first approach was a statistical style analysis of tones in a representative corpus of 18 yoiks. The analysis determined the relative frequencies of tone onsets and two- and three-tone transitions. It also identified style characteristics, such as pentatonic orientation, the presence of two reference pitches, the frequency of large consonant intervals, and a relatively large set of possible melodic continuations. The second approach was a behavioral experiment in which listeners made judgments about melodic continuations. Three groups of listeners participated. One group was from the Sami culture, the second group consisted of Finnish music students who had learned some yoiks, and the third group consisted of Western musicians unfamiliar with yoiks. Expertise was associated with stronger veridical expectations (for the correct next tone) than schematic expectations (based on general style characteristics). Familiarity with the particular yoiks was found to compensate for lack of experience with the musical culture. The third approach simulated melodic expectancy with neural network models of the self-organizing map (SOM) type (Kohonen, T. (1997). Self-organizing maps (2nd ed.). Berlin: Springer). One model was trained on the excerpts of yoiks used in the behavioral experiment including the correct continuation tone, while another was trained with a set of Finnish folk songs and Lutheran hymns. The convergence of the three approaches showed that both listeners and the SOM model are influenced by the statistical distributions of tones and tone sequences. The listeners and SOM models also provided evidence supporting a core set of psychological principles underlying melody formation whose relative weights appear to differ across musical styles.

Expectation in Melody: The Influence of Context and Learning

“…Similar experiments with Finnish spiritual folk hymns (Krumhansl, Louhivuori, Toiviainen, Järvinen, & Eerola, 1999) and indigenous folk melodies (yoiks) of the Sami people of Scandinavia (Krumhansl et al, 2000) have, however, questioned the cross-cultural validity of such revised models. In both studies, it was found that the model developed by Krumhansl (1995a) provided a much better fit to the data than those of Krumhansl (1995b) and Schellenberg (1996Schellenberg ( , 1997.…”

“…By contrast, Schellenberg et al (2002) have found the opposite to be true in experiments with adults and infants in a task involving the rating of continuation tones following contexts taken from Acadian (French Canadian) folk songs. They suggest that the difference may be attributable partly to the fact that none of the musical contexts used in the experiments of Krumhansl et al (1999Krumhansl et al ( , 2000 ended in unambiguously large and implicative intervals (Schellenberg et al, 2002, p. 530). While Schellenberg et al (2002) and Krumhansl et al (1999) found strong support for the principle of proximity with only limited influence of registral return and intervallic difference, Krumhansl et al (2000) found the strongest bottom-up influence came from the principle of intervallic difference with weak support for the principles of proximity and registral return.…”

“…They suggest that the difference may be attributable partly to the fact that none of the musical contexts used in the experiments of Krumhansl et al (1999Krumhansl et al ( , 2000 ended in unambiguously large and implicative intervals (Schellenberg et al, 2002, p. 530). While Schellenberg et al (2002) and Krumhansl et al (1999) found strong support for the principle of proximity with only limited influence of registral return and intervallic difference, Krumhansl et al (2000) found the strongest bottom-up influence came from the principle of intervallic difference with weak support for the principles of proximity and registral return. The consonance predictors of Krumhansl (1995a) made a strong contribution to both models especially in the case of the folk hymns (Krumhansl et al, 1999(Krumhansl et al, , 2000.…”

Expectancy in melody: Tests of children and adults.

“…Regardless, the fifth in question was not open (implicative), because the second tone fell on a stronger metrical position (on the downbeat of a measure) compared with the first tone (on the upbeat). In a subsequent experiment, Krumhansl et al (2000) used a different set of eight melodic fragments, none of which ended in a large interval. Note.…”

Toward a Unified Theory of the I-R Model (Part 1)

“…From this beginning, many experiments based on the I-R model ensued (e.g., Cuddy & Lunney, 1995;Krumhansl, 1991bKrumhansl, , 1995aKrumhansl, , 1995bKrumhansl, , 1997Krumhansl et al, 2000;Pearce & Wiggins, 2006;Schellenberg 1996Schellenberg , 1997Schellenberg et al, 2002;Schmuckler, 1989;Thompson, Balkwill, & Vernescu, 2000;Thompson, Cuddy, & Plaus, 1997;Thompson & Stanton, 1998). For other important studies on melodic implication, see Carlsen (1981), Larson (2004), Margulis (2005), and Unyk and Carlsen (1987).…”