Anders Elowsson
This study explores the German songs of the Essen Folksong Collection and provides statistical findings from them. The aim has been to study aspects of a contextual nature such as relationships between time domain and pitch domain and the melodic contour at the phrase level. With statistical examinations of melodies a better understanding of several aspects in the music has been achieved and the results are relevant to several fields of music science, such as music cognition and algorithmic composition. The contextual nature of music has been shown by examining ten different aspects. Among the most interesting findings are: A clear relationship between pitch salience and metrical salience. Notes at salient metrical positions are more likely to have a high pitch salience. A clear relationship between interval size and note length. Large intervals often occur between longer notes and small intervals are more often found between shorter notes. That melodic stairs of one pitch step are more common in a rising formation than in a falling formation. That contour repetition is almost always accompanied by rhythmic repetition at the phrase level. That earlier findings for convex phrase arches is mostly a phenomena of an upward movement in the first phrase of a song and a downward movement in the last phrase of a song.