Comparative musicology: The science of the world’s music

Abstract

What is music, and why did it evolve? How can we understand the unity and diversity found throughout the world’s music? Scientific attempts to answer these questions through cross-cultural comparison stalled during the 20th century and have only recently begun to make a resurgence. In this book, Patrick Savage synthesizes recent advances to outline a new unified theoretical/methodological framework to understand and compare all of the world’s music. This framework takes advantage of new scientific theories and methods – particularly from advances in computer science, psychology, genetic anthropology, and cultural evolution – to apply comparative musicological research to answer longstanding questions about the origins of music and to contemporary issues including music copyright law and UNESCO policy. In doing so, he argues for an inclusive, multidisciplinary field that combines the qualitative methods traditionally employed by musicologists and cultural anthropologists with quantitative methods from the natural sciences.

Public peer review of Sauvé & Bhachu (2023) “Let’s talk about it: Positivism and critical theory in dialogue”

“…While making up fictional conversations may help make ideas clear, it risks creating over-simplified straw-person arguments that a serious modern researcher is unlikely to ever make in a contemporary research article (e.g., "music… could be described as a universal language"). It is possible to find statements similar to this in contemporary scientific discourse (as I have done; Savage, 2022), but they require more context to explain. To me, engaging with and critiquing previous scholarship requires directly citing/quoting it, even if that is difficult and complicated.…”

“…I have tried to take this approach in my own chapter on this topic (Savage, 2022), and I encourage the authors to consider doing the same. (I realize the authors are inspired by a previously published peer-reviewed scientific article.…”

Group singing is globally dominant and associated with social context

“…Our analysis showing different relationships with community size in GJB and NHS, which we suggest results from the inclusion or exclusion of larger-scale societies in these corpora, illustrates how using criteria such as sample size, society size, or missing data can inadvertently introduce sampling biases—issues that cross-cultural researchers have been struggling with for generations and continue to struggle with today [ 34 , 35 ]. Another possible sampling issue in both corpora is the under-sampling of certain social contexts simply because field researchers find them less interesting or harder to access.…”

“…Crucially, both GJB and NHS—and indeed our analysis of these data—are limited by decontextualization and by the relative lack of involvement of researchers from each society in the process of analysing and interpreting their data [ 34 ]. As anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have long noted, every social event is suffused with meaning, the interpretation of which requires ‘thick description’ [ 38 ].…”

The Global Jukebox: A public database of performing arts and culture

“…Scientific cross-cultural comparison of music had been conducted since the late 19th century when the invention of the phonograph made relatively objective comparison of sound possible for the first time, birthing the field of comparative musicology, which later became known as "ethnomusicology" [25][26][27][28][29][30]. But until Alan Lomax's research on expressive culture, such comparisons were generally limited to relatively small samples of recordings and emphasized those aspects of melody, pitch and rhythmic structure that are privileged in Western staff notation.…”