Social Movement: A Song’s Journey across Time and Space

Even the loudest singing by the grandest choir cannot be heard by anyone more than a few hundred feet away. Songs do not just “blow in the wind” toward people geographically distant from those who have sung them. Additionally, after their live performance, songs do not remain in the air surrounding their singers and audiences, except in some metaphorical sense. Even within the same geographical community, whose members are in regular face-to-face communication with one another, songs are learned not simply “by osmosis” but rather through repeated performance, listening, repetition, and memorization. For a song to be learned by others