PhD in music cognition
Last updated: 2011.09.13
PhD in KNAW Computational Humanities Project
1.0 fte (38 hours/week) for four years

In oral culture, artifacts such as songs and stories are passed on to next generations without written or technical reproduction media, just by voice and ear. Oral transmission implies alteration and variation to a considerable extent. Yet after several generations of oral transmission the artifacts are still ‘the same’ (in oral terms), or at least recognizable variants (from a literate point of view). How can this be? Are there convergent forces? How can we model the process of oral transmission?

In the project Tunes & Tales we will create such models, based on the vast oral corpora of Dutch folksongs and Dutch and Frisian folktales of the Meertens Institute. Based on the automated analysis of motif sequences, two PhDs and a postdoc will create generative models that simulate the oral transmission including the inherent variation. The models will be tested on the oral material of the Meertens Institute in cooperation with domain experts of the Institute. This will contribute to understanding the mechanism of oral transmission.

The aim of the project Tunes & Tales is twofold: 1. To design a representation of melodies and tales as (layered) sequences of motifs (building blocks). The core question of this subproject is: what are melodic and narrative motifs and how to represent melodies and tales as layered sequences of motifs in an appropriate and well-defined data structure that is implementable and suitable for further computational processing? A second question is whether it is possible to recognize tunes and tales from oral culture automatically based on the motifs they consist of. 2. To design a model that explains and predicts the variation that occurs to melodies and tales in the process of oral transmission. The project team will consist of two Ph.D. students, a post-doctoral researcher and a scientific programmer.