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Folksongs and traditional festivals are central to almost every activity of the Yoruba people. The contemporary world is full of pains, worries, sufferings and despair and various anti-social activities, in spite of pompous claims and glaring efforts of science and technology in solving old problems to create many new ones. Hence, every individual needs to relax, amuse, and get his or her mind off the dull struggles, worries and sorrows of life through folksongs and festivals. The Yoruba folksongs and festivals as soul-searchers and soul-menders therefore, serve the aesthetic, therapeutic and communicative purposes as tension relievers as well as elixir through which individuals are firmly reassured that there is still hope for humanity. Folksongs and traditional festivals, as manifestations of oral literary genre, possess the remarkable ability to simultaneously entertain, educate, heal and provide solace in individuals. Through them, virtues of the community are upheld and cultural values are projected. It thus concluded that Yoruba folksongs and festivals are a vital communicative instrument for pleasure and a therapy to heal and soothe individuals. Therefore, it is recommended that the Yoruba people continue to utilize folksongs as a means of entertaining, educating, consoling, and comforting themselves as the need arises. Additionally, the study underscores the importance of preserving and perpetuating traditional festival celebrations in Yoruba society, as they serve as a unifying force among the people and a potent platform for showcasing the rich culture and traditions of the Yoruba people to the wider world. Other African societies should also intensify efforts in employing folksongs and festival performances to project their respective cultural identity to the wider world.

This article explores the voices of sailors across time, focusing on how song and prayer animate the nautical cult of St. Nicholas of Myra from the Middle Ages to the present. Drawing on hagiography, poetry, and music, it examines how medieval sources portray sailors’ cries to St. Nicholas during storms at sea, often depicting univocal, affective pleas that provoke divine response. These representations—especially in Latin sequences such as Congaudentes exultemus—highlight the cultural weight of the literal and metaphorical voice within miracle narratives. The article then bridges medieval and modern devotional soundscapes through nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographic collections from Apulia, Italy, particularly through the work of folklorists Saverio La Sorsa and Alfredo Giovine. Their records of Barese sailors’ songs and prayers to St. Nicholas—still sung today—provide embodied counterpoints to the mediated voices of medieval texts. Through this transhistorical lens, I argue that voice operates as connective tissue in the devotional lives of seafarers: an expression of fear, faith, and communal identity. By amplifying sailors’ voices in text, song, and performance, both medieval and modern traditions construct a vivid aural archive that affirms the enduring relationship between St. Nicholas and those who navigate the dangers of the sea.

Human song exhibits great structural diversity, yet certain aspects of melodic shape (how pitch is patterned over time) are widespread. These include a predominance of arch-shaped and descending melodic contours in musical phrases, a tendency for phrase-final notes to be relatively long, and a bias toward small pitch movements between adjacent notes in a melody [Huron D (2006) Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA)]. What is the origin of these features? We hypothesize that they stem from motor constraints on song production (i.e., the energetic efficiency of their underlying motor actions) rather than being innately specified. One prediction of this hypothesis is that any animals subject to similar motor constraints on song will exhibit similar melodic shapes, no matter how distantly related those animals are to humans. Conversely, animals who do not share similar motor constraints on song will not exhibit convergent melodic shapes. Birds provide an ideal case for testing these predictions, because their peripheral mechanisms of song production have both notable similarities and differences from human vocal mechanisms [Riede T, Goller F (2010) Brain Lang 115:69–80]. We use these similarities and differences to make specific predictions about shared and distinct features of human and avian song structure and find that these predictions are confirmed by empirical analysis of diverse human and avian song samples.

The paper introduces the concept of mnemopoetics, i.e., how songs are composed to be remembered, how they are shaped by oral memory as only the songs worth remembering were preserved by the community. After a brief discussion of ‘memory of the body’ (cf. Saussy 2016), the author introduces the formal mnemopoetic features (role of incipit, genre, rhythm, dialogue, incremental repetition, strophic arrangement, etc.). In the second part, he focuses on the semantic mnemopoetic role of incipit parallelism, which announces what will happen next in the song-story (cf. Andersen 1985; Marčok 1980; Bartmiński 2016). He then analyzes the first part of Jan Poláček’s song-collection from Moravian Slovakia (Slovácké pěsničky, 1936) and distinguishes nine main groups of songs with the incipit parallelism variously announcing: 1. erotic desire, 2. courtship, 3. longing for marriage, 4. an obstacle in the way of love, 5. a sinister omen leading to a bad outcome, 6. disappointment, 7. parting, 8. death; and 9. joyousness. For example, the image of ‘running water’ in the first verse suggests an unhappy development in the love affair portrayed by the song. The study further verifies the validity of six most prominent identified announcements on the broader material of František Sušil’s (1860) classical collection of Moravian folksongs. As suggested by fieldwork introduced in the study, traditional singers from Moravia and western Slovakia are typically aware of the ‘second’ meaning in songs, and this awareness of song symbolism helps singers — and readers — not only to remember songs better, but to do them justice when interpreting them. More broadly, the study represents a contribution to the methodological analysis of symbolism in traditional song lyrics.

This article examines Bhojpuri folksongs that have migrated from north Indian villages to overseas locales, or that have migrated from oral tradition to literary fiction in Hindi and English. The literary examples are drawn from Hindi novels by Ramdarash Mishra, Rahi Masoom Raza, and Phanishwarnath Renu as well as from the novel Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. Each author makes use of song from north India, or originating from India, as with Ghosh, who also includes material from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and the Indian Ocean Island of Mauritius. I draw on fieldwork in each location to present a literary tour of this global musical scene. In doing so, I argue for space in literary analysis for consideration of individual performances, for experiences of individual performers and listeners, and for the ethnographic encounters that led to various songs finding their way into literary fiction. The literary examples from Hindi and Anglo-Indian fiction are limited to songs I have personally documented in the field, allowing an analysis of the overlapping areas of fiction, history, and ethnography.

Sociolinguists frequently examine the nature of gradual, internal shifts in languages and dialects over time, arguing for both cognitive and cultural factors, as well as those that might be somehow internal to the language itself. Similarly, musicologists have often argued that musical genres and even specific songs can be examined through gradual diachronic shifts, which seem to be especially accelerated in traditions that rely on oral transmission. For example, Spitzer (1994) examined the stemma of “Oh! Susanna” and noticed that it tended to become more pentatonicized at cadence points by dropping scale degree seven, and suggested that this might be true with folk songs in general. To test this, we employed both experimental and corpus-based paradigms. The experimental approach attempted to simulate oral transmission in a compressed timeframe by involving singers who heard and replicated short musical excerpts, and then would teach a colleague, who in turn passed it on to another participant. Similarly, we conducted a corpus analysis that examined the prevalence of descending stepwise endings in styles of music primarily transmitted orally compared with those transmitted primarily through notation. The experimental results suggest that cadence points in Western folk music are more likely to lose scale degree seven through the act of oral transmission, and the corpus study suggests that, although stylistic constraints play a large role in folk music, there might also be a relationship between transmission and physical affordances.

Bourdieu argues that fields of action produce a specific habitus in participants, and views this specific habitus as a mechanism through which the field is reproduced. Although Bourdieu acknowledges the habitus as gendered, he does not theorize gender as part of the mutually constitutive relationship between field and habitus. Using evidence from two cultural fields, the Toronto heavy metal and folk music scenes, I show that gender is central to the process through which field and habitus sustain each other. The metal field produces a \"metalhead habitus\" that privileges gender performances centered on individual dominance and status competition. In contrast, the \"folkie habitus\" encourages gender performances centered on caring, emotional relations with others, and community-building. These differently gendered habitus support different working conventions: music production occurs largely through volunteer-based nonprofit organizations in the folk field, and individual entrepreneurship in the metal field. The gendered habitus also supports different stylistic conventions: guitar virtuosity in the metal field, and participatory music-making in folk. Applying a gendered lens to the field–habitus relationship clarifies the mechanisms through which cultural fields shape individual action, and the mechanisms through which cultural fields are reproduced and maintained.

Human cultural traits, such as languages, musics, rituals and material objects, vary widely across cultures. However, the majority of comparative analyses of human cultural diversity focus on between-culture variation without consideration for within-culture variation. In contrast, biological approaches to genetic diversity, such as the analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) framework, partition genetic diversity into both within- and between-population components. We attempt here for the first time to quantify both components of cultural diversity by applying the AMOVA model to music. By employing this approach with 421 traditional songs from 16 Austronesian-speaking populations, we show that the vast majority of musical variability is due to differences within populations rather than differences between. This demonstrates a striking parallel to the structure of genetic diversity in humans. A neighbour-net analysis of pairwise population musical divergence shows a large amount of reticulation, indicating the pervasive occurrence of borrowing and/or convergent evolution of musical features across populations.