The Structure of an Oral Tradition – Mapping of Hungarian Folk Music to a Metric Space

Abstract

To find the essential musical relations characterising 2323 typical Hungarian folk melodies as a musical system, we developed a method relating melodies to points of a multidimensional Euclidean melody space. The study of the resulting point systems is based on the method of principal component analysis, and shows the inherent relations of a rich oral musical tradition as a very regular, unbroken clustered structure. The majority of the points are grouped in parallel as well as perpendicular clusters. The musical interpretation of parallelism and orthogonality highlights certain basic construction and variation principles in Hungarian folk music.