Music across Cultures (original) (raw)

2019, Foundations in music psychology: Theory and research (pp. 503–541). The MIT Press.

Most research on the perception and cognition of music has involved the consideration of measurements taken from Western listeners in response to presentation of Western tonal music. This chapter discusses empirical studies of music that involve a cross-cultural comparison, and reviews relevant areas of study that are useful for generating hypotheses. It begins by discussing the concepts of culture on the one hand, and music on the other, as these terms are often left undefined. The chapter then provides a review of research in this area, focusing on the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional foundations of music. The authors organize their review according to the level of analysis at which cross-cultural comparisons can be made, considering elementary features of music and the syntactic rules for combining them, behavior genetics, emotional experiences, and evidence for hard-wired constraints on musical systems. They primarily focuses on the cognitive foundations of music—a perspective that is traditionally used to explain similarities across cultures. However, they points readers to parallel research in ethnomusicology, which draws upon scholarly traditions in anthropology and sociology and highlights some of the dramatic differences in the social, economic, and political functions of music across cultures.(PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

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