Hello! My name is Isha Yanamandra, I am a junior at Monte Vista High School. Some of my hobbies and interests include singing, piano, tennis, soccer, yoga,  and teaching, I enjoy playing with my dogs, Bliss, and Neo, and being involved in the diverse communities around me such as Kriti Social Initiatives and Society for Ethnomusicology. I am also the founder of Yogasangeeth, a nonprofit aimed at enriching and healing the world with music, yoga, and Vedic processes aligned with the indigenous traditions of India. I am interested in cultural anthropology, how cultures, societies, and music evolve, and the cultural and social context within a community.


In this blog, I will be exploring and researching topics/articles on Ethnology, and Musicology. I really hope you enjoy reading!

Popular posts from this blog

Music Perception and Cognition: A Review of Recent Cross-Cultural Research - Catherine J. Stevens

  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, ...
Read more

Music’s “design features”: Musical motivation, musical pulse, and musical pitch - John C. Bispham

  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...
Read more

Cultural constraints on music perception and cognition - Steven J. Morrison and Steven M. Demorest

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...
Read more