The Sticky Riff: Quantifying the Melodic Identities of Medieval Modes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Andrew Hughes' Late Medieval Liturgical Offices afforded chant scholarship more melodies than it knew what to do with. Until now, chant scholarship involving 'Big Data' usually meant comparing individual feasts to the whole corpus or looking at general trends with respect to 'word painting' or stereotyped cadences. New research presented here, using n-gram analysis, networks, and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) looks to the nature of the gestural components of the melodies themselves. By isolating the notes preceding, and proceeding from, the naturally occurring semitones in the medieval church modes, we find significant recurrence of particular phrases, or riffs, which we propose could have been used to help 'build modes' from the inside out. Special care needed to be brought to the question of assumed B-flats that were not given explicitly in the manuscripts represented in Hughes' work. Understanding modes not as 'scales' but as a collection of associated smaller musical gestures, has resulted in a set of recurring riffs that appear as the identifiers of their larger contexts and confirming the influence of an earlier, oral / aural culture on these late medieval chants where musical literacy was expected.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".