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, the meter of a piece of music tends to be regular, with beat levels and time intervals related by simple ratios like 1:1 or 2:1. While music from other regions like Asia and Africa use irregular meters that seem to be difficult for western adults to perceive, meaning that even certain preferences can be influenced by one’s culture (Stevens, 2012, p. 657).

 

In this way, musicological accounts of diverse music have helped redefine what we know about music cognition. There’s still a long way to go, much more to learn about other cultures and its concepts of music and several theories of cognition to validate based on the form, the role and the importance of music in different cultures (Stevens, 2012, p. 659).


Another important trend in current research is to investigate the similarities and differences in the processing of music. For this, studies have taken a look at many aspects of music, from musical expectancy and memory to emotional responses, thinking and feeling in music (Stevens, 2012, p. 661). Even new interesting areas are being explored, such as music’s relation to dance, musical phenomena as an auditory experience that is also intimately related to movement (Stevens, 2012, p. 662).

 

Nowadays diverse musical systems are endangered. The fast spreading “monoculture” of the West has reached far and wide. As music psychologist David Huron once said, “even in the western Amazon, people listen of Funk Carioca and Christina Aguilera”. And even though globalization is a process of its own, cross-cultural studies and documentation can help us improve the current theories of music perception and cognition. Raising awareness of the world’s music diversity will always help present and future generations to recognize and learn different musical and cultural forms (Stevens, 2012, p. 663).

 

 

Reference:

Stevens C. J. (2012). Music perception and cognition: a review of recent cross-cultural research. Topics in cognitive science, 4(4), 653–667. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01215.x

 

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