The cultural and historical significance of folkloric forms of sound advertising
The article is devoted to trading cries as a phenomenon of folk culture. Street vendors' cries, as a way of attracting a customer in a brief period, seem to be a significant indicator of intonation vocabulary in every culture found in a particular space and time. The cries of Paris, the cries of London, as well as the cries of the Russian cities recorded by Russian ethnographers, represent the richest material for studying not only advertising practices, but also the musical and intonational specifics of speech, its phono-semantic capabilities in transmitting emotional meanings through the melody of the spoken text. The author of the article has collected evaluative statements of Russian musicologists-folklorists about the specifics of the transition of melodiously sounded cries into musical speech utterances with special rhythmic and modal features. The analysis of the selected corpus of street vendors' cries allowed the author of the article to give them a versatile description of them as a sociocultural and musical phenomenon. The verbal and musical features of trading cries examined in the article reflect such factors as the specifics of national and regional folk cultural traditions, the influence of foreign musical culture, the current market situation and weather conditions. While the attempt to record the intonation and rhythmic structure of the cries does not reflect all the parameters of this phenomenon, it appears to be a noticeable characteristic of the composer's pitch and ability to draw the "sound landscape" of a street as a whole. The fact that many composers and musicologists have tried to record and analyse traders' cries provides us with a context within which they may be regarded as a specific form of folk art.