Isha's blog

Being at the very heart of human evolution, music has created and afforded spaces for individual and collective ideas, thoughts, or conceptions. Since the beginning of history, music’s ability to hold multiple interpretations may have enabled interactions and negotiations among the early human societies.    Foundations of music enculturation   When it comes to music, fundamental components such as pitch or duration aren’t really defined by culture. We talk about musical enculturation when studying the relationship of certain groups of people to these kinds of constructs. For example, when understating if a specific pitch or duration is considered typical, acceptable, or desired among a group of people (Morrison and Demorest, 2009, p. 67).   A few examples of the influence of enculturation in music are people’s responses to pitch, rhythm, and more complex musical structures such as scalar or metrics. The different responses observed between cultural groups reflect dif...

  Ethnomusicology, like many other social sciences, makes use of theories and methods from other disciplines like anthropology, linguistics, archaeology or history. One of the most important methods used in all of them is what we know as “fieldwork” (Arslan, 2018, p. 2).   For an overview on the history of “fieldwork” in ethnomusicology we must travel back to the 19 th century. Back to comparative musicology and a research method called “armchair ethnomusicology”, in which scholars waited for collected data from around the world to be brought to them. During these times, scientific information taken from any data was based on comparison. Scholars compared the freshly collected data with information they had in order to build theories without taking any part in the data collection process (Arslan, 2018, p. 3).    Over time ethnomusicology matured, but during its early years it had to lean on the already established disciplines, adapting their theories and methods to ...

  The study of identity and its relationship to musical practice is relatively new in American ethnomusicological studies. The relationship between music and identity involves many other subjects such as individual agency, urban or popular music, gender, migration, nationalism and globalization (Rice, 2007, p. 19). Going back in time, the very first article published in the famous journal of Ethnomusicology , using the word “identity” in its title, was written in 1982. Since Christopher Waterman’s article “I’m a Leader, Not a Boss: Social Identity and Popular music in Ibadan, Nigeria”, identity became a regular subject in the journal of Ethnomusicology and one of the most important areas in the field   (Rice, 2007, pp. 18-19).   But what is identity and how does it relate to ethnomusicology?   Defining identity is not an easy task. The term itself may have first appeared during the 1950’s through the work of psychologist Erik Erikson, who studied the developmental st...

  Music is social, dynamic and interpersonal. As musical cultures are endangered by globalization, it’s now more important than ever to document and analyze musical diversity and consider the way people and cultures interact with it and its environment. Luckily nowadays cross-cultural studies are focusing on the way listeners perceive music of other cultures, its structures, similarities and differences (Stevens, 2012, p. 654).   Because of processes of enculturation and people’s acquired perceptual habits, it is always a challenge to compare music from different regions of the world. How can similarity or complexity be measured without the bias of a particular cultural perspective? Recent studies have tried to focus on the development of perceptual habits from exposure to a particular music environment (Stevens, 2012, pp. 659-660).   Aspects like cultural knowledge can also influence musical expectancies in the context of an unfamiliar musical scale system. In the West, ...

  Music, Communication and Affect   Music, like every other way of human communication, exists and depends upon culture (Bispham, 2009, p. 30). Even though the meaning of music is the result of a specific cultural and social context, all of us seem to be able to engage and to respond to some aspects of music outside our own culture (Bispham, 2009, p. 30). This kind of engagement works in different dimensions such as biological, social or cultural spaces (Bispham, 2009, p. 30).   Music is usually associated with emotions. People describing “shivers” or “chills” while listening to music are evidence of strong emotional experiences (Bispham, 2009, p. 30). However, there is still not enough evidence to prove that musical emotions are in any way different from other types of emotions (Bispham, 2009, p. 30). Maybe the most common example could be the use of music in society or even in psychology as a means of altering or creating particular moods in individuals or groups (Bisph...

I came across this paper while researching the acculturation of South Asian communities in North America. While this paper by Professor Viranjini Munasinghe of Cornell University covers a different topic creolization, I feel there are similarities and an attempt is to learn from patterns assuming there are. While I understand some of what is presented, there is a lot I don't understand and at the same time, I find the topic intriguing.  This paper is a critique of a critique of original research by the author.  Munasinghe frames her views and peers' views as relatively close on the fundamentals and at the same time emphasized that her basis of the research is beyond superficial cultural blending and also covers the influence and impact due to political, economic, and power relations. (Note here that Creolization is the process through which creole languages and cultures emerge ( ref ) and a Culturalist is someone who focuses on the importance of culture in determining behavi...

  Computation in ethnomusicology   Ethnomusicology as we know it, is focused on music in its social-cultural contexts. In recent years, with the arrival of more digital technology, ethnomusicology has tried to improve its relationship with computation, approaching and innovating with computational research in the field of Digital Humanities.     Today ethnomusicologists are working on projects that rely on processing and understanding large amounts of digital data, producing new research and focusing on the use of computing for extracting musical information, such as Music Information Retrieval (MIR) or Computational Ethnomusicology (Egan, 2021, p. 479). The application of computing and technology in ethnomusicology keeps growing, bringing benefits for both research and fieldwork. One of its greatest examples is the Seán Ó Riada Project at University College Cork in Ireland. The Seán Ó Riada Project, named after the famous Irish composer, had the goal of arrang...

From the perspective of cognitive science, music is one of the most bizarre and fascinating features of human culture. If we think about other human behaviors, such as eating or sleeping, music seems to have no obvious benefits. That's why the evolutionary origins of music have puzzled scientists for a long time (McDermott and Hauser, 2005, p. 29).   When we think that every culture in the world has some form of music and that most cultures developed music independently from each other, it can’t be helped to ask if there is some innate “machinery” motivating the production and appreciation of music (McDermott and Hauser, 2005, p. 30). Much of the 20th-century theories were based on the idea that musical preferences were mostly arbitrary, however, in 1984 composer and music theorist Arnold Schönberg argued that musical preferences were mostly part of one’s cultural upbringing (McDermott and Hauser, 2005, pp. 30 – 31).     Universal Features of Music: Pitch, lullabies, and ...