Transcript PowerPoint bemutató

Janos Sipos (www.zti.hu/sipos)
János Sipos (Institute for Musicology, HAS), www.zti.hu/sipos
Using artificial intelligence for comparative musicology on
Eurasian folk music – Following the folk music of a community
to different areas
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
Important task of the archives are the reliable and durable saving of the material and the
service for the general public. However there is a similarly important task: to help the
researchers and scholars in scientific analysis of the material.
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What do scholars do with the folk music material in the archives? Let us overview the
main phases of the folk music research. In the 19th and the early 20th centuries the
universalistic mode became predominant. It was searching for the origin and the evolution
of everything, and from it developed the comparative musicology. In contrast to the
comparative musicology came the (American) ethnomusicology, with the same main question
and sometimes the methods of the „social anthropologists”: how do individual cultures
function. Though these days comparative and analytical musicology is sometimes
considered “old fashioned”, this branch is regaining more and more strength. And as we
will see computer programs developed by Zoltán Juhász may give enormous help to it.

With Zoltán Juhász we continue to build a large computer-database of musical
transcriptions - in other terms we have been developing a transcription-archive. This
archive completes well the other parts of the archives and makes the analytical research
much easier.

First we convert the melodies to a form understandable by computers using Finale or
ABC note writing programs. Though this is a lengthy work, afterwards the transcriptions
can be used in many ways. What is more, recently the international research community
created lots of available and downloadable digitized transcription-databases, which
increases the radius of our action considerably.
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
Let me illustrate one application of this database and computer
program in one of my researches concerning the music of a
mystic Islamic sect, the Bektashis.

Since 1999, my wife, Éva Csáki, and I collected more than 1000
melodies in 24 villages from Turkish women and men of the
Bektashi faith, whose grandparents migrated from the Balkans
to the European part of Turkey. By the end of this research
series it seemed so that we had reached our goal, and recorded
the majority of their religious and secular songs.

The nomadic and semi-nomadic Turks did not become Muslims
at any one time but rather gradually, over centuries. They
adopted some Sunni, Shiite and mystic elements of Islam while
continuing to cling to their traditional shamanistic beliefs and
practices. Bektashism is a syncretistic folk religion connected to
nature; they worship mountains, trees and heaven. We can
consider it a Turkish form of Shiite religion mixed with Sufism.

Let us see an excerpt from their religious ceremony. It illustrates
the fact that structural analysis reflects only one side of the big
picture. For lack of time this time I can not introduce the
cultural and social aspects. However in our book in preparation
"The psalms and folk songs of a mystic Islamic order" we
introduce the musical culture of this group from different
aspects. [1] As an example let us have a glance into their
religious ceremony.
1st video: Bektashi zikr from Thrace
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
Now we turn to our proper subject: to the comparative analysis of the Bektashi songs.
I call your attention to the uniqueness of the following method. We do not "only" compare two folk musics, or search the
existence of some specific melodies or melody type in different folk music. Now we project a whole classified material to the folk
music of other people searching if there are similar melody groups, and if there are, how strongly are they represented in the folk
music in question.
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A) Melodies traceable back to a single short section (I-II)
I. Melodies built up of motives rotating around the middle tone of a
trichord
II. Melodies traceable back to a single short line or motif (e.g. laments)
B) Melodies traceable back to two short sections (III-IV)
III. First line is undulating or ascending (often AkA form and
different cadences)
IV. Two short stagnant, descending or hill-like sections with small
compass and 2, (b)3 or 4 cadences.
C) Melodies with four short sections and (1) main cadence (V)
D) Melodies with four or more sections (VI-X)
VI. Low melodies with 2/b3 (2) x cadences and higher melodies with
4/5 (2) x cadences
VII. Low and higher melodies with b3(b3)x cadences
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
VIII. “Psalmodic” and descending melodies with 5/4 (b3) b3/1
cadences
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IX. A special “Chanakkale” melody group
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X. Melodies with characteristic line or bar-sequences
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XI. Disjunct melodies
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E) One- or two sectioned tripodic melodies (XII)
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F) Melodies with "doomed" form (XIII)
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The computer aided comparison

We tell the program the name of the
database of the folk musics we want to
compare, in this case that of the
Bektashis and that of the Bulgarians.
Then we determine the desired degree
of the similarity, and we tell the program
to compare whole melodies or only
specified sections.

The program generates a map with
green point for the Bektashi melodies
and purple points for the Bulgarian ones.
The program helps to find melody
parallels as well.

Then the researcher examines the
melody parallels, and if he finds them
convincing, he copies them into a file.
Based on the quantity and character of
the parallels we can draw far-reaching
conclusions on the relation between the
folk music in question.
High beginning, high end
High beginning, low end
Low beginning, high end
Low beginning, low end

The
interface of the program
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The area of the research: Bulgaria- Thrace (Bektashis) – Anatolia – Azerbaijan - Mongolia
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Let start off our journey.
Anatolia
Bektashis are Turks, whose ancestors came from
Anatolia to the land of Bulgaria then went back to the
European part of Turkey.
A very close musical connection would not be a surprise
and really, most of the Bektashi melody types do have
Anatolian parallels.
This confirms the Bektashi’s Anatolian origin and the
survival of their Turkish cultural identity.
On this and on the next slide I show Anatolian-Baktash
melody parallels form the VIIIth melody class (see
above)
2.nd video
Anatolian (a)-Bektashi (b) melody parallels
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Bektashi -Anatolian melody parallels (cont.)
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Azerbaijan
Let us go a bit further to the East. Azeri and Anatolian
Turks are linguistically related, and there are lots of
common event in their ethnogenezis as well. However
in Anatolia the Turkish tribes (arriving in different
waves from Inner Asia) Turkicised the former
Byzantium, while in Azerbaijan these tribes settled on a
Caucasian and Iranian substratum.
Azeri folk music joins to Bektashi music only with a few
melody parallels. These similar melodies have small
compass and very simple melodic line. There are two
types of these parallels. One consists of a short sections
with narrow compass and of its variants.
Azeri-Bektashi melody parallel
The other type is based on two sections moving on CD-E-F-G pentachord, the second section being one
second lower then the first one. This latter structure can
be found in the Hungarian, Anatolian and other folk
music as well. Let us now listen to an Azeri lament
showing these features.
3.rd video: Karabahi sirató
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Mongolia
As Turkic and Mongolian people belong to the Altaic language family, musical
connection between them is quite possible to imagine.
However among the more then two thousands melodies at hand only 4 or 5
show lesser or greater similarities in the melody movement. As example we
show one very rare Bektashi parallel to a typical Mongolian fifth-shifting
melody type on ex.4.
Bektashi-Mongolian melody parallel
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Bulgaria
Let us turn back to a people living closer to the
Bektashis, to the same place where they came to Turkey
from. We know that some 1000 years ago BulgarTurkic people took part in the Bulgarian ethnogenezis,
and then merged into the Slavic majority. Later Oghuz
tribes arrived in many waves, but they did not merged
into the Bulgarians.
The comparative research shows that, in spite of the
long coexistence, Bulgarian and Bektashi music has
almost nothing to do with each other. Bulgarian Turks,
among them Bektashis preserved their musical world
intact, and did not let Bulgarian influence in.
There are only a few Bektashi and Bulgarian parallel.
This kind of songs can be found in great quantity in
Bulgaria, but only one or two types represent them in
the Bektashi repertoire. We see a representative of
these melodies on the next example.
Bektashi-Bulgarian parallel
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I hope, this paper cold prove that we have a very effective tool with which we may compare whole folk
musics. This may open new perspectives in the field of comparative musicology
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