Articles
DOI DOI: 10.62441/actainnovations.v63i.1079

LEVERAGING TRADITIONAL FOLK SONGS AS SOUND HERITAGE FOR CULTURAL INNOVATION: A TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVE

Connie Keh-Nie Lim1, Qingyang Zhuang2
  1. 1 Faculty of Applied and Creative Arts,Universiti Malaysia Sarawak,Kota Samarahan, 93400, Malaysia.
  2. 2 Faculty of Applied and Creative Arts,Universiti Malaysia Sarawak,Kota Samarahan, 94300, Malaysia.

Abstract

Context: Folk music is a poorly exploited type of intangible sound heritage whose digitization is often discussed in the technology and innovation management (TIM) literature as a means to cultural innovation, yet the empirical description of the underlying sound heritage material at scale is scarce. Research Objectives: This study computationally describes the structure of folk songs in a huge digitized Chinese folk song corpus and explains the results in a TIM framework of dynamic capabilities and open innovation. The methods used include symbolic music extraction from a set of 8,652 songs from 11 regional volumes of the Anthology of Chinese Folk Songs, which provides descriptors of pitch, interval, rhythm, pentatonic conformity and lyric density. The following analyses were performed: principal component analysis, k-means clustering, Kruskal-Wallis regional contrasts (corrected for the false-discovery rate), and a random-forest regional classifier. Conclusions: After correction, thirty-one out of thirty-two of the tested features were statistically different between the various regions, with the lyric presence (ε² = 0.91) and the lyric-note coverage (ε² = 0.77) features showing the largest effects; three stable stylistic clusters were found (silhouette = 0.12) and the classifier obtained a mean cross-validated accuracy of 53.7% against an eleven-class chance baseline of 9.1%. Conclusion: The folk song samples from China show statistically significant and machine-detectable regional signatures which support structured digitization as a basis for cultural innovation enabled by technology, but direct adoption and commercialization demands specific primary TIM research.

How to Cite

Lim, C. K.-N., & Zhuang, Q. (2026). LEVERAGING TRADITIONAL FOLK SONGS AS SOUND HERITAGE FOR CULTURAL INNOVATION: A TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVE. ACTA INNOVATIONS, 63, 23–37. https://doi.org/10.62441/actainnovations.v63i.1079
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