This thesis examines how melodic organization in Chinese folk song traditions is described, formalized, and tested across analytical, computational, and perceptual domains. The project follows a theory-corpus-perception loop: theoretical concepts frame the research questions, which are addressed with computational models of corpus statistics and are then tested in cross-cultural listening experiments that examine how these patterns shape perception. Together, these studies develop a culturally informed, empirically grounded account of Chinese folk song structure and an empirically rigorous methodological template for music cognition that connects music-theoretical knowledge with computational evidence and perceptual responses.
A central theme across the studies is whether distributional information alone explains the differentiation and learning of musical structure. Corpus analyses of the heptatonic diao based on manual annotation and distributional models indicate that the variability of pitch-class profiles within and between diao categories is substantial. Cross-cultural listening studies on the implicit learning of heptatonic diao show that short-term exposure does not lead to a global update in the perception of tonality; instead, local schematic and motivic learning often emerges first. The outcomes depend on task context and on listeners' cultural and musical backgrounds; perception therefore reflects the interaction between immediate input and culturally grounded knowledge. These findings challenge accounts that attribute implicit learning of tonal hierarchy primarily to statistical information and indicate that learning-related changes may not be fully captured by global shape alignment.
These challenges motivate a search for representations that extend beyond pitch-class frequencies. The three-tone qiang, an interval-based and order-insensitive melodic unit from Chinese theory, offers one such alternative. When applied to the corpus, qiang-based representations of melodic structure yield a compact and interpretable space with coherent regional character, complementing perceptual evidence that listeners track schematic and motivic structure beyond tone distributions.
A recurring theme across music-theoretical research and the empirical studies is the modal and polytonal character of Chinese scales, which complicates models that rely on the single-tonic assumptions of the Western tonal system. Clues to this characteristic emerge in music-theoretical discussions of pentatonic transformation and are examined in a perception study, which shows that shared pitch content, rather than intervallic structure, exerts a stronger influence on musicians' judgments of pentatonic similarity, aligning with Chinese theoretical accounts that pitch vocabulary often outweighs intervallic order.
Taken together, these studies show that distributional cues are illuminating but not definitive, and that sequential, motivic, and schematic information is es
