Same Form, Slightly Different Function: Senegalese Cumulative Songs as Contrasted to their Canadian and European Counterparts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The “formula song” genre encompasses such forms as “chain songs”, “enumerative songs”, and “cumulative songs”. In Western society we are familiar with some of these forms through songs such as “There’s a Hole in my Bucket”, “Here we go Round the Mulberry Bush”, “Alouette” and “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. Many of us will know these as “stand alone” songs not necessarily connected to any other oral art form. Historically, here in Canada, some are thought to have been used as “paddling songs” to accompany the motion of the Voyageurs’ paddles which provided more power when dipped in unison. In more modern usage we find these songs as part of the school programme, used to encourage memorisation, counting, sequencing, reverse sequencing, group singing and the like. They are also useful for introducing the idea of song structure or “form” in the music programme. And then, of course, they are sometimes sung just for fun! My research among the Jola-Bandial people of southern Senegal has revealed that they too have formula songs as a part of their oral folk literature. In many instances in this society however, they form a part of a greater whole – they are a key feature of the story-telling tradition. This paper will look at the performance context of these songs, in both the African and Western contexts, as well as the function and form of these songs as they are found in the Jola Bandial oral tradition and that of Western society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".