Melodic expectation in Finnish spiritual folk hymns: Convergence of statistical, behavioral, and computational approaches

This study of Finnish spiritual folk hymns combined three approaches to und erstanding melodic expectation. The first approach was a statistical style analysis of a representative corpus of 18 hymns, which determined the relat ive frequencies of tone onsets and two- and three-tone transitions. The sec ond approach was a behavioral experiment in which listeners, either familia r (experts) or unfamiliar (nonexperts) with the hymns, made judgments about melodic continuations. The third approach simulated melodic expectation wi th neural network models of the self-organizing map (SOM) type (Kohonen, 19 97). One model was trained on a corpus of Finnish folk songs and Lutheran h ymns (Finnish SOM), while another was trained with the hymn contexts used i n the experiment with the correct continuation tone (Hymn SOM). The three a pproaches converged on the following conclusions: (1) Listeners appear to b e sensitive to the distributions of tones and tone transitions in music, (2 ) The nonexperts' responses more strongly reflected the general distributio n of tones, whereas the experts' responses more strongly reflected the tone transitions and the correct continuations, (3) The SOMs produced results s imilar to listeners and also appeared sensitive to the distributions of ton es and tone transitions, (4) The Hymn SOM correlated more strongly with the experts' judgments than the Finnish SOM, and (5) the principles of the imp lication-realization model (Narmour, 1990) were weighted similarly by the b ehavioral data and the Hymn SOM.