Meme Hunting with the Humdrum Toolkit: Principles, Problems, and Prospects

Introduction: Theorizing a Memetics of Music

[A meme is] a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. . . . Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process . . . [that], in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

(Dawkins 1989, 2nd ed.,p. 192)

So wrote Dawkins over a quarter of a century ago, drawing together various strands of nature–culture analogizing from the previous two centuries and more and recasting them in the crucible of his powerful selfish gene hypothesis—the notion that, ultimately, the driving force of evolution is the single gene, whose phenotypic effects (i.e., those on the organism's morphology and behavior) influence the reproductive prospects of that gene in ways that justify Dawkins's metaphor of apparent selfish intentionality.

In its use of music as the first example of a meme substrate, Dawkins's definition is a provocative invitation to the development of a memetics of music—a subdiscipline of musicology that would attempt systematically to apply the insights of Universal Darwinism (Plotkin 1995) to the medium of music to trace pattern transmission and evolution over time. Such an application has strong intuitive attraction: after all, music appears to support discrete, "digital" patterns within the fluid, "analog" continuity of the sound stream—on a smooth continuum from pointed instances of intraand inter-composer quotation to the myriad standardized clichés and gestures that are the "connective tissue" of a musical style. In what is essentially a memetic study (he terms it "referential analysis"), Cope offers a formalization of this continuum moving from "quotations" and "paraphrases" through "likenesses" to "frameworks" and "commonalities" (2003, p. 11), and he describes his software, Sorcerer, that can detect such inter-composer references.

Nearer to the former than to the latter end of this continuum, an example of cadence-pattern replication such as that shown in Figure 1 suggests that what was probably imitated from J. C. Bach (a common figure in his style) was a closed and cognitively salient unit for Mozart. It is, Dawkins would argue, a selfish meme that hijacked Mozart's neuronal mechanisms in the service of its own replication.

It appears that, in brief, a memetics of music would need to address the following three broad conceptual issues (for fuller treatments, see Jan 2000a, 2002b, 2002, and 2003):

1. 1. The ontological basis of the musical meme, perhaps in terms of an analogy with the genotypephenotype distinction in biology, although its application to memetics is still controversial (Blackmore 1999, p. 63).

2. 2. The nature of the musical meme, or how the continuum of musical elements is segmented into discrete particles that can be related, by presumed replication, to equivalent particles in other contexts. This issue also encompasses the replication of musical memes at different hierarchic locations.

3. 3. The evolutionary dynamic of musical memes, accounting for the continuous change of musical style over time as a consequence of the differential transmission and survival of mutant memes.

One problem with exploring the second and third points above is the sheer volume of music that must be investigated for statistically significant conclusions to be drawn from it—although suggestive conclusions may often be drawn from non-empirical studies. Clearly, computer-aided study is a viable method of making the empirical investigation of such a corpus of music manageable. For assistance with the development of a theory of memetics and the investigation of memes in music, one software package in particular seems the most suitable currently available—the virtues of Cope's Sorcerer program notwithstanding—namely the Humdrum Toolkit, conceived and developed since 1989 by David Huron (1997, 2002).

Figure 1.

Replicated Patterns in Works of J. C. Bach and Mozart. (a) J. C. Bach, Keyboard Concerto in E-flat Major, Op. 7, No. 5 (C 59; 1770), I, mm. 52–55; (b) Mozart...