Mining Musical Traits of Social Functions in Native American Music

Native American music is perhaps one of the most documented repertoires of indigenous folk music, being the subject of empirical ethnomusicological analyses for significant portions of the early 20th century. However, it has been largely neglected in more recent computational research, partly due to a lack of encoded data. In this paper we use the symbolic encoding of Frances Densmore’s collection of over 2000 songs, digitized between 1998 and 2014, to examine the relationship between internal musical features and social function. More specifically, this paper applies contrast data mining to discover global feature patterns that describe generalized social functions. Extracted patterns are discussed with reference to early ethnomusicological work and recent approaches to music, emotion, and ethology. A more general aim of this paper is to provide a methodology in which contrast data mining can be used to further examine the interactions between musical features and external factors such as social function, geography, language, and emotion.