David Huron and Bret Aarden
Center for Mapping, Ohio State University.
October 17, 2000
Musical works reflect the cultures and subcultures from which they originate. Depending on the music, culture-specific features may be subtle or obvious. In many cases, knowledgable listeners can identify whether a work is Slavic or Germanic in origin, whether it comes from the north or south of India, or even resolve the specific town or district from which a musician hails.
Musicologists have long been interested in tracing how music has migrated from one region/culture to another, and how the music of cultures intermingle and influence one another.
One of the best generalizations one can make about culture is that it is spatially correlated. (When we say that something is "French," we mean that it relates to, or originates in particular parts of the world at particular times.) One way to test musical intuitions about cultural identity and influence is to investigate the pertinent geographical information.
In this presentation, we will describe ongoing work at OSU to address questions of musical culture using systematic empirical methods. Our current research has focussed on a database of roughly 4,000 European folksongs. Using an electronic gazetteer, we have resolved the latitude and longitude values for innumerable towns, villages and regions. Using the Unix-based GMT package, we are able to quickly generate maps related to arbitrary musical features derived from the database of transcribed music.
In interpreting the resulting maps, a number of technical and statistical issues arise. These issues are highlighted in our talk.