Avleddha: an example of Griko in popular music.

This paper is part of a wider study about a corpus of songs, collected in the three different languages spoken in Salento (Puglia- South Italy): Italian (with regional variety), Griko and Salentino dialect. We analyze all the discography (texts and music of songs) of Avleddha , one of the most famous popular bands, founded in the early '90s in the Grecìa Salentina. This corpus is compared to other 80 songs, that includes English, Italian and popular music. We use Principal Component Analysis and techniques of sound analysis (spectrograms) we demonstrate that songs of the four bands are well separated from a point of view of complexity of the texts and music. The aim of this study is to characterize Avleddha's music with reference to the other group of songs. We show that it is closer to the tradition of Salento popular music, but is able to maintain an original fingerprint, that makes it unique in its field. In this research the description of language systems at morphosyntactic level is not present, but we present a novel quantitative approach to reveal features both generic and specific in corpora of popular music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]