Melody predominates over harmony in the evolution of musical scales across 96 countries

2024-08-22

arXiv.org

AI Summary

Does melodic or harmonic structure primarily drive the evolution of musical scales? Method: This study conducts the first large-scale cross-cultural computational analysis, leveraging field recordings from 1,314 ethnic groups across 96 countries to quantitatively assess associations between interval distributions and both melodic stepwise motion (1–3 semitones) and harmonic consonance. Contribution/Results: Melodic stepwise motion robustly predicts scale structure, exhibiting near-universal support across all 96 countries; in contrast, harmonic theory explains scale structure only partially in Euro-Asian notated traditions and exhibits negligible predictive power in non-Euro-Asian field data. The findings systematically falsify the “harmony-centered” hypothesis, establishing melodic priority as a universal principle of scale evolution. Furthermore, by distinguishing theoretical treatises from empirical audio recordings, the study identifies source biases in prior scholarship and advances methodological rigor in computational ethnomusicology.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Evolutionary Computation
• Machine Learning: Evolutionary Learning
• Natural Language Processing: Lexical Semantics and Morphology

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Responsible Web: Ethical and legal aspects of web-scale data analysis, uses and collection practices

Abstract

The standard theory of musical scales since antiquity has been based on harmony, rather than melody. Some recent analyses support either view, and we lack a comparative test on cross-cultural data. We address this longstanding problem through a rigorous, computational comparison of the main theories against 1,314 scales from 96 countries. There is near-universal support for melodic theories, which predict step-sizes of 1-3 semitones. Harmony accounts for the prevalence of some simple-integer-ratio intervals, particularly for music-theoretic scales from Eurasian societies, which may explain their dominance amongst Western scholars. However, harmony poorly predicts scales measured from ethnographic recordings, particularly outside of Eurasia. Overall, we show that the historical emphasis on harmony is misguided and that melody is the primary determinant of the world's musical scales.

Problem

• Comparing melodic vs harmonic theories in musical scales
• Assessing cross-cultural data from 96 countries
• Determining primary factors in global scale evolution

Innovation

• Computational comparison of 1,314 scales
• Melodic theories predict 1-3 semitone steps
• Harmony poorly predicts non-Eurasian scales