Supervised descriptive pattern discovery in Native American music

The discovery of recurrent patterns in groups of songs is an important first step in computational corpus analysis. In this paper, computational techniques of supervised descriptive pattern discovery are applied to model and extend ethnomusicological analyses of Native American music. Using a corpus of over 2000 songs collected and transcribed by anthropologist Frances Densmore and building on Densmore’s own music content features, the analysis identifies musical differences between indigenous groups and between musical style areas of the North American continent. Contrast set mining is adapted to discover global-feature patterns which are distinctive for a group, statistically significant and maximally general. The work extends previous descriptive studies in computational folk music analysis by considering feature-set patterns of variable size. Discovered patterns confirm, differentiate and complement ethnomusicological observations on Native American music.