Project Title: Experience and Exposure: Linking Church Music Corpus to Melodic Representations in the Tsimane Population
Project Description: Music research has historically been confined to WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. More recently, work in music cognition has sought to address this limitation by collecting data from participants across diverse cultural contexts. A key challenge in this effort is linking musical exposure with experimental measures—exposure is difficult to define and even harder to quantify empirically. My project seeks to analyze the interval structures of a church music corpus of the Tsimane people—an indigenous population in the Bolivian Amazon—using computational pitch analysis techniques and to compare them with experimental data. This provides a rare opportunity to connect well-defined corpus data—likely reflecting the most widespread form of musical experience within the community, namely church practices—with experimental measures of melodic representation. Since linking exposure data and corpus evidence to experimental results is often highly challenging, this work has the potential to advance our understanding of how musical exposure shapes musical experience.
Most Important Accomplishment: Yet to come.
Reflections on the College Scholar Program: I feel very grateful for this opportunity to do interdisciplinary research on music—my primary interest outside of academics. I am also looking forward to connecting with my peers who combine topics and techniques from an array of disciplines in unexpected and unique ways.