Question

Read the passage below:

For over half a century, classical scholarship on Homeric epic was dominated by the Parry-Lord hypothesis of oral formulaic composition, which posited that oral bards rely on an inflexible repertoire of traditional metrical phrases to improvise long narratives in real time. According to this framework, the presence of repetitive epithets is not an aesthetic choice but an absolute cognitive necessity dictated by the constraints of unscripted performance. However, recent cognitive ethnographers examining living bardic traditions in Central Asia have nuanced this traditional paradigm. By utilizing high-resolution audio recording and linguistic tracking, these researchers demonstrated that while formulaic phrases indeed mitigate cognitive load during performance, master bards frequently modify metrical fillers to introduce novel thematic subtext or subtle socio-political critiques. Far from being passive managers of inherited phraseology, skilled oral poets dynamically manipulate traditional formulas to assert individual agency. Thus, while the classical Parry-Lord model correctly identified the structural mechanics of oral performance, its emphasis on formulaic determinism underestimated the poet's capacity for creative improvisation within traditional boundaries.

In the context of the passage, the sentence beginning "By utilizing high-resolution audio recording..." serves primarily to