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 ...