Irish traditional tunes show diversity grows despite selection pressures
Population Ecology of Tunes
Sound
Summary
How cultural traditions keep a wide variety of songs popular over time is a big question. This study looked at 13 years of data on almost 20,000 Irish traditional tunes and found that some tunes are naturally more likely to be learned or passed on. They also found that new tunes keep arriving, which helps keep the variety growing even though some tunes become more popular than others. The researchers showed that popular recordings can make old, forgotten tunes suddenly popular again.
What this means in practice
- •For music archivists: Analyze popularity trends to preserve and promote culturally significant tunes by identifying features linked to greater tune retention.
- •For music streaming services: Enhance recommendation algorithms for traditional music by including intrinsic tune fitness and social linkage features to predict tune popularity.$Commercial implications: Enables more accurate user engagement and targeted content promotion in niche music genres, improving subscription and ad revenue.
Tested on one dataset.
Authors
John M. McBride, Armand. M. Leroi
Abstract
How cultural repertoires maintain diversity under selection is a fundamental question in cultural evolution. We address this using thirteen years of weekly popularity data for approximately 20,000 Irish traditional tunes, fitting ecological birth-process models under neutral, frequency-dependent, and per-tune selection hypotheses. We find strong evidence that tunes differ in intrinsic fitness - some are systematically more likely to be learned than others. We find that 29% of the variance in fitness can be explained by a mixture of social and melodic features. Some tunes appear to be carried along via linkage due to the tradition of playing tunes in sets, analogous to selective sweeps in genetics. By measuring changes in fitness over time and comparing this with recordings we precisely identify the mechanism by which a long-dormant tune can become fit through a popular recording. Despite the directional selection, repertoire diversity increases, driven by the continual arrival of new compositions. These results demonstrate that selection and diversity can coexist in a cultural ecosystem, and establish Irish traditional music as a quantitatively tractable system for studying the evolution of cultural variants and understanding what makes a tune stand out.