[celoyd]

One function is as a sort of compression/mnemonic.

Bingo. I think this is very important insight from CS to this kind of literature. You might enjoy Robert Bringhurst’s discussion of Haida myths, where he calls them fractal in a way that doesn’t set my teeth on edge (the way most non-rigorous uses of that word do).

This is the kind of thing that makes me sad about the two cultures problem. The few scholarly discussions of oral literature that I’ve read seem to be groping for this kind of concept, while a lot of hackers I know are dismissive of the idea that there’s anything of real interest in fields like anthropology. Everyone loses if we can’t find ways to say things like “self-similar structures compress well” across fields.

Edit to self-link: I tried to make this kind of idea engaging to some of my friends at http://basecase.org/env/time-and-myth . The book where Bringhurst talks about this: http://books.google.com/books?id=QhMkb1HOjz4C .

[stcredzero]

A few Irish tunes have a somewhat self-similar structure. There are two parts, which are a call/response to each other, and each of the two parts themselves have a call/response structure. Sometimes it goes another level, but then we start getting down to the granular limit of a distinct melodic idea.