Comparative Musicology

The Science of the World’s Music

Patrick E. Savage

Associate Professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies

Keio University, Shonan Fujisawa Campus, Japan

Please note: This preprint is an excerpt of the Acknowledgments and Chapter 2 from a book under
contract with Oxford University Press. The book contract was signed after the proposal was peer-reviewed
and accepted, but this excerpt will differ from the final published version of the book. All figures included
are preliminary placeholders that may be updated and adapted – some figures are omitted pending
copyright permissions. I welcome questions, comments, citation, and constructive criticism, bearing in
mind that this is a draft subject to revision. Please direct correspondence to psavage@sfc.keio.ac.jp.

Recommended citation: Savage, P. E. (Under contract) Comparative musicology: The science of the
world’s music. Oxford University Press. Preprint: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/b36fm

Back cover blurb:

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.

Author bio:

Patrick Savage is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies at
Keio University in Japan, where he directs the CompMusic Lab for comparative and computational
musicology. Previously, he received his BA in Music Composition from Amherst College, MSc in
Psychology from McMaster University, PhD in Ethnomusicology from Tokyo University of the Arts,
and was a postdoc in Anthropology at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on using science
to understand cross-cultural diversity and unity in human music. His awards and recognitions include
the JSPS Ikushi Prize from the Japanese Emperor; the Young Scientists’ Prize from the Japanese
Minister for Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology; Rising Star designation from the
Association for Psychological Science; finalist for the inaugural New Investigator Award from the
Cultural Evolution Society, and the inaugural Early Career Award (Faculty Level) from the Society
for Music Perception and Cognition.

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Detailed contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Ch. 1. Introduction
1.1 Aims of the book
1.2 Structure of the book
1.3 Definitions of key terms
1.3.1. “Music”
1.3.2. “Comparative musicology”
1.3.3. “Evolution”
1.3.4. “Universal”
Ch. 2. Origins: The rise and fall and rise of comparative musicology
2.1 Origins of music, origins of musicology
2.2 Berlin school and early comparative musicologists
2.3 The folk revival and tune family research
2.4 Cantometrics
2.5 Transition from “comparative musicology” to “ethnomusicology”
2.6 Rise of music cognition and music information retrieval
2.7 Comparative musicology in the 21st century
2.7.1 Analytical Approaches to World Music
2.7.2 A “new comparative musicology”
2.7.3 Music perception among the Tsimane’ and beyond
2.7.4 The “Natural History of Song” project
2.8 Comparative musicology in the pandemic era: On racism, decolonization, coauthorship,
and “helicopter research”
2.9 Conclusions: Colonialism, technology, and globalization
Ch. 3. Classification: Measuring musical similarity within and between societies
3.1 Measuring and comparing the world’s musical concepts, behaviours, and sounds
3.2. Concept: Perceptual experiments
3.2. Musical behaviour
3.3. Musical sound and musicology
3.4: Examples:
3.5 Conclusions:
Ch. 4. Cultural evolution: Music and human history
4.1 Definitions/history
4.2 Cultural evolution
4.3 Music and human history
Ch. 5. Biological evolution: Musical universals
5.1 Definitions/history
5.2 Musical universals
5.3 Biological evolution
5.4 Gene-culture coevolution
Ch. 6. Application: The future of the world’s music
6.1 Music education
6.2 Music copyright
6.3 Music industry
6.4 Cultural heritage
Afterword
Appendix A: Musical examples
Index
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Acknowledgments
In 2017 while I was doing a postdoc in Oxford I made an unsolicited phone call to Martin Baum and
arranged to meet him at the imposing Oxford University Press building (Fig. 1) to discuss the initial
idea that led to this book. I submitted the formal proposal just as I was finishing my postdoc and
signed the book contract in early 2018 just after starting my tenure-track faculty position at Keio
University Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC).

Figure 1. Me about to meet my editor Martin Baum for the first time at the Oxford University Press
building in October 2017.

As a new faculty member, I wildly underestimated how much time I would have to write the book
once I started teaching and supervising students. Thus, the initially agreed October 2020 deadline was
already starting to look unrealistic – and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Suddenly my 2- and 6-
year-old children couldn’t return to kindergarten/daycare for months and we were trying to figure out
how to take care of them and flip my teaching online without going insane.

Thankfully, Martin was very understanding and kindly agreed to give me numerous extensions over
the subsequent years. I am very grateful to him, Janine Fisher, and the rest of the Oxford University
Press editorial and production staff for their understanding, support, and assistance.

This book and my career in comparative musicology would never have happened without the early
support and guidance of Steven Brown, who supervised my Masters in Psychology, Neuroscience
and Behaviour at McMaster University in Canada. Steven was the one who conceived my first
research project comparing musical and genetic diversity, the one who introduced me to
Cantometrics, and the one who proposed the basic idea for our “Toward a new comparative
musicology” article that provided the basis for this book. He was also an extremely generous and
supportive mentor beyond just research: he convinced the department to accept and fund me despite
having never taken a single psychology course and costing them substantially more money as an
international student; he let my wife and I stay with him in his house for weeks after we moved to

3
Canada until we could find our own apartment; and he took the time and guts to give me a wake-up
call when I started off in my Masters programme on the wrong foot.

I am grateful to the peer reviewers who gave constructive feedback on my initial proposal and the
many people who gave feedback on various drafts of individual chapters. These people include:
Aniruddh Patel, Anna Lomax Wood, Luke Glowacki, Manvir Singh, Samuel Mehr, Matt Sakakeeny,
Mariusz Kozak, John McBride, Malik Sharif, David Levit, Jonathan Stock, Tecumseh Fitch, [….
more to be added]. I’m especially grateful to those who graciously read my criticism of their own
work and took the time to help me refine the criticisms to make them fairer, more accurate, and more
constructive.

I want to give a special acknowledgment to my Keio SFC colleague Shinya Fujii and to our many
trainees (postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduate students) from my own CompMusic Lab
and Shinya’s NeuroMusic Lab. To Shinya: #PILife 大変だけど、一緒に Music Science の研究が
できて幸せです！

Shinya’s and my trainees read draft chapters at our joint journal club and gave some of the most
thorough feedback of all who commented. It has been my greatest pleasure and honour as a professor
to supervise these trainees. Much of the research described in this book has been led by them and
could not have been conducted without their tireless effort and technical skills. Here I’d like to
particularly acknowledge Yuto Ozaki, Hideo Daikoku, Gakuto Chiba, Shafagh Hadavi, Marin
Naruse, Sam Passmore, and Yuchen Yuan, who provided helpful feedback on drafts of the book, led,
and/or assisted in much of the research described in the book.

I love music, science, and the world – individually, but especially when they come together in world
music science. But I love my family most of all and have always tried to put them first (though not
always successfully). I am blessed to have an incredible and supportive family. I’m especially
thankful for my wife Sawa, who sacrificed much more than she should have had to in order to support
my academic career. Thank you, Sawa.

Big thanks too to my parents Martha and Mike, and parents-in-law, Masami and Ken, for all the help
they gave during that initial lockdown in Japan, another lockdown the following year back in my
childhood home in Aotearoa New Zealand, and all throughout the years. Thanks for all the many
school/daycare drop-offs and pickups and watching the kids from the crack of dawn on Sunday
mornings so Sawa and I could catch up on much-needed sleep. Being near grandparents was one of
the main factors in our decision about where to live, and I can’t express what a good decision that
was and how grateful we are for all the grandparental help.

A special thanks too to my mum, Martha Kane Savage, who overcame a lot of struggles and
discrimination to become a trail-blazing and award-winning Full Professor of geophysics, and whose
constant feedback and advice on academic life has been invaluable throughout my career. And of
course to my dad, Mike Savage: thanks for everything, including giving me your guitar and for all
the great folk music sessions at home that helped inspire my love of music. A bittersweet thanks to
my late brother Kelly who was taken from us too soon, but who always supported my nerdy research
while also making sure I kept a healthy work-life balance and didn’t forget to enjoy the good things
in life like jumping into bodies of water, playing board games, and watching The Wire. Finally, to
my children Maika and Kazushi: I know you don’t always like when I sing old songs to you, but I
hope my love of music rubs off on you in some way – you are the future of the world’s music.

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2
Origins
The rise and fall and rise of comparative musicology
2.1 Origins of music, origins of musicology
This history of comparative musicology and its relationship to other fields such as ethnomusicology,
historical musicology, anthropology, and music cognition has been addressed at length from many
different perspectives. In this chapter, I will summarize some of the key works, scholars, and debates,
with an emphasis on those consistent themes that continue to be actively debated and which we will
focus on in later chapters (e.g., evolution, universals). For further details and perspectives on this
history, please refer to works such as (Godwin, 1992; Graf, 1974; Gruber & Födermayr, 2003; Kursell,
2018; Merriam, 1977, 1982; Morgenstern, 2018; Nettl, 2015; Nettl & Bohlman, 1991; Rehding, 2000;
Schneider, 2006; Toner, 2007).

Comparative musicology has deep roots that could be traced at least as far back as the Ancient Greeks
(Godwin, 1992; Morgenstern, 2018). However, the field first acquired its own name and identity
during the 19th century when musicology and psychology were forming as distinct academic fields
and the concept of evolution was new and exciting. In these early days, the idea of distinct academic
disciplines was just emerging, and what we now consider “interdisciplinary” research combining
science and the arts was not seen as unusual. Darwin speculated at length upon the origins of music
in his 1871 book The descent of man, where he famously wrote:

As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least
use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked among the most
mysterious with which he is endowed. They are present...in men of all races...but so different
is the taste of the several races, that our music gives no pleasure to savages, and their music
is to us in most cases hideous and unmeaning
Darwin (1871) The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex

As a “Savage” myself, I recognize some of Darwin’s outdated language now feels offensive. Yet the
underlying ideas capture three paradoxical features of music that still drive much research today: 1)
music’s evolutionary function is “mysterious”, but 2) music is universal (present in “all races”), and
yet 3) music is incredibly diverse - so diverse it can seem “hideous and unmeaning” to outsiders.
Importantly, Darwin saw the idea of comparing cross-cultural similarities and differences in music
as central to understanding its evolution, although the field of comparative musicology had not yet
been formally defined.

Formal definition came the following decade, when Guido Adler co-founded the first journal of
musicology (Vierteljahrsschrift fur Musikwissenschaft) and opened it with his 1885 article “The
scope, method, and aim of musicology” (originally published in German, with an English translation
in 1981). Adler defined not only comparative musicology but also the entire field of musicology,
which he saw as a “tonal science” with the goal of “Discovery of the True and the Advancement of
the Beautiful”. He divided musicology into two major branches: 1) a more humanistic “historical”
branch focused on “history of music according to epochs, peoples, empires, nations, regions, cities,
schools of art, artists”, and 2) a more scientific “systematic” branch focused on establishing “the
highest laws in the individual branches of tonal art” (Fig. 2.1; for further discussion see (Sharif, 2019)).

5
Figure 2.1. Adler’s (1885) classification of the field of musicology. The major split was between
“historical” and “systematic” musicology, with comparative musicology part of the latter.
[public domain]

Adler provides the first definition of comparative musicology (“Musikologie”): “the comparison of
the musical works – especially the folksongs – of the various peoples of the earth for ethnographical
purposes, and the classification of them according to their various forms”. Adler classified
comparative musicology within the “systematic” branch along with other sub-branches that would
now be described as falling under music theory and/or music cognition. It’s also worth noting that
Adler specifically mentioned acoustics, mathematics, physiology, psychology, and linguistics
(“grammar, metrics, and poetry”) as “auxiliary sciences” to systematic musicology.

Over 130 years later, Adler’s vision of a “unitary field theory of musicology” seems stunningly ahead of
its time. Many of the issues he raises – music vs. language, perception vs. production, theory vs.
practice, insider vs. outsider, etc. – continue to dominate the field, as do the six key points he identifies
(pp. 11-12) : 1) origins, 2) relationship to nature, 3) relationship to culture, 4) effects of performance
context, 5) limits on expressiveness, and 6) ethics.

The same year Adler laid out a theoretical vision for comparative musicology, Alexander Ellis (1885)
published a ground-breaking empirical comparative musicological analysis of scale tunings entitled
“On the musical scales of various nations”, whose legacy still resonates today (pun intended) 1. Ellis

1The data Ellis reported were based on measurements “by the delicate ear of Mr. Alfred James Hipkins”. Ellis explains
that "the only reason why I have not associated his [Hipkins’] name with mine at the head of it is, that I do not wish to
make him responsible for the shape in which our joint work is produced." This is a fascinating early example of
authorship negotiation in collaborative research, a topic we will return to later in the book.
6
proposed a new cross-culturally applicable system for measuring tuning without relying on Western
staff notation by dividing an octave into 1200 “cents”, such that 100 cents equals one equal-tempered
semitone. Because the human ear/brain generally can’t distinguish between tunings more finely than
a “just noticeable difference” (JND) of around 10 cents (Thompson, 2013), Ellis’s cent scale has
proven detailed and flexible enough to remain commonly used over a century later.

Just as important as Ellis’s method was his conclusion. In contrast to many who think of early
comparative musicology as obsessed with universality, Ellis actually argued against the universality
of musical scales. After detailed analysis of cent measurements of diverse Eurasian (Greek, Arabian,
Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Javan) scale tunings combining theoretical treatises, audio recordings,
and live performances by native musicians, Ellis concluded:
"The final conclusion is that the Musical Scale is not one, not 'natural,' nor even founded
necessarily on the laws of the constitution of musical sound so beautifully worked out by
Helmholtz, but very diverse, very artificial, and very capricious."

It is true that Ellis’s data did challenge the kinds of universal laws that people like Helmholtz
(Helmholtz, 1954) were advocating under which musical pitch relationships were seen as primarily
determined by the psychoacoustic properties of resonating objects and the way they were processed
by the brain. For example, Helmholtz had proposed that a preference for harmonic intervals based on
simple-integer frequency ratios such as 2:1 (octave), 3:2 (perfect 5th), or 4:3 (perfect 4th) was due to
the way the fundamental frequencies of most instruments produce “harmonics” that resonate at simple
integer ratios. For example, a note with a fundamental frequency at 100Hz will produce harmonics
at 200Hz, 300Hz, 400 Hz, etc., while a note an octave higher with a fundamental frequency at 200Hz
will produce harmonics at 400Hz, 600Hz, 800Hz, etc. Thus, half of the harmonics overlap (200Hz,
400Hz, 600Hz, etc.) for the octave (2:1 ratio), which is traditionally considered the most “consonant”
interval, while almost no harmonics overlap for intervals traditionally considered “dissonant” such as
the minor 2nd (16:15 ratio; Fig. 2.2)2.

Figure 2.2. Helmholtz proposed that consonance was a property arising from the harmonic
vibration of sound waves at simple integer ratios (Bowling & Purves, 2015). [Fig. 2; permission
pending].

Helmholtz’s theory predicts that the smallest-integer ratios within an octave, such as the perfect 5th
(3:2 ratio, corresponding to ~702 cents) and perfect 4th (4:3 / 498 cents) should appear most
universally across diverse musical scales. However, Ellis’ careful documentation that slendro and
pelog scales played on Javanese gamelan were intentionally tuned to intervals substantially different
from the simplest integer ratios (e.g., 484 cents, 728 cents; Fig. 2.3) provides surprising and important
counter-evidence against universality.

2This explanation is simplified. Section 2.7 discusses the debate over the universality of consonance and its possible
underlying mechanisms as it continues today (Bowling et al., 2017; Bowling & Purves, 2015; McDermott et al., 2016).
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Figure 2.3. Ellis’s (1885) Javanese gamelan data on which he argued against the universality of
musical scales. [public domain]

Yet Ellis’s conclusion that this Javanese data "entirely destroys the assumption of the necessity of
founding a scale upon the Fourth or Fifth" may be exaggerated (Schneider, 2006). We can accept the
existence of exceptions while still recognizing statistical tendencies that are common throughout most
but not all of the world’s music (“statistical universals”). Ellis’s other data shows that intervals
approximating a perfect 4th or 5th are indeed found in almost all of the scales examined, and that in
all cultures examined the octave is, in Ellis’s words, “naturally recognised, although not always
correctly tuned”.

I see Ellis’s conclusions as exemplifying two contrasting themes that will recur in this book: 1) the
power of quantitative data to inform theoretical debates, and 2) the messy reality that quantitative
data is usually complex and open to multiple subjective and historically contingent interpretations.
Back when assumptions about universality were widespread, Ellis’s emphasis on diversity seemed
radical. Over a century later, the tables were turned and Ellis’s vision of music as “very diverse” had
become the default assumption. Now researchers like mysef looking at similarly continuous data
showing gradations of commonality choose to emphasize universality over diversity by using terms
such as “statistical universals” (Savage, Brown, et al., 2015). Whether one views continuous data on
universality/diversity as “half-empty” or “half-full” thus can depend as much on the zeitgeist and
subjective interpretations of individual researchers as on the “objective” data.

2.2 The Berlin school and early comparative musicologists

[TO DO: Add examples of non-European early comparative musicologists (cf. Blum, 1991)]
Around the same time that Adler and Ellis were laying down comparative musicology’s theoretical
and methodological foundations, Carl Stumpf was building an influential group of early comparative
musicologists based at the University of Berlin, which became known as the “Berlin school” 3. Given
recent interest in comparative musicology by music psychologists (Jacoby et al., 2020), it is important
to recognize Stumpf as a founding figure in both comparative musicology and in psychology. He had
already published “Tone Psychology” (Stumpf, 1883/2021), a seminal work on the psychology of
pitch perception, and would become a leading figure in gestalt psychology and phenomenology.

Stumpf’s interest in music cognition led him to study its cross-cultural variation. A year after Adler
and Ellis’s seminal papers, Stumpf (1886) published the first detailed scholarly transcriptions of non-
Western songs. Although Edison’s invention of audio recording a decade earlier would eventually
revolutionize music and musicology, the technology was still rudimentary. Stumpf instead
transcribed the songs directly from live performances by Nuskilusta, a member of a group of Nuxalk

3Most of the Berlin school’s original work was published in German, but many key works have been translated into
English (Hornbostel, 1975; Hornbostel & Sachs, 1961; Stumpf, 1911, 2021).
8
(“Bella Coola”) musicians from British Columbia brought to Germany as part of a “Völkerschau”
(“exhibition of [foreign] people”) organized by the Hamburg zoo owner Hagenbeck. Stumpf would
ask Nuskilusta to repeat his singing until Stumpf felt he had accurately captured the songs in Western
staff notation (Kursell, 2017; Nettl, 2015).

Having experienced the limits of representing non-Western music in Western notation for which it
was not designed, Stumpf realised that the new audio recording technology would be crucial to the
development of comparative musicology. When another group of musicians toured Germany in 1900,
this time from Siam (now Thailand), Stumpf and his colleague Otto Abraham recorded their
performance, which became the first recording of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv. While a separate
Phonogrammarchiv had been started in Vienna one year earlier, the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv
would go on to become the world’s largest archive of traditional music recordings (Wiedmann et al.,
2011; Ziegler, 2006, 2017). Although the archive was severely compromised by World War II and
the ensuing Cold War occupation of Berlin, it still holds over 100,000 recordings, including over
13,000 wax cylinder recordings from the early days of recording technology. This archive became a
core source of data for Stumpf’s theories on universality and diversity in musical pitch and its role in
the evolution of music, which he brought together in his 1912 book The origins of music (Stumpf,
1911/2012).

Stumpf and Abraham were joined by Erich von Hornbostel, who became the director of the Archive
in 1905. The three of them turned to the new recording technology to collect and precisely analyze
recordings of diverse music by repeatedly playing back the same performances. The first recordings
were made in Berlin from visiting musicians or collected from travellers returning from abroad (the
Berlin researchers rarely travelled themselves to collect field recordings). Important sources of
recordings included researchers such as Franz Boas and Frances Densmore (Fig. 2.4) working in the
Americas, where European colonizers were still encountering indigenous cultures whose musical
systems had developed independently of Eurasian traditions. The Berlin school were particularly
interested in the dimension of pitch, and used Ellis’s cent system to catalogue variation in melodies
and scales of various traditions, including from Thailand, Japan, India, Turkey, Tunisia, and British
Columbia.

Figure 2.4. Piegan Blackfeet tribe leader Mountain Chief listening to Frances Densmore playing
back a recording on a phonograph in 1916 (https://loc.gov/pictures/resource/npcc.20061/). (For

9
a fascinating mini-documentary on the surprising backstory behind this famous photo, see (V.
Brown, 2022). [public domain]

Most of these analyses were co-authored by Hornbostel and Abraham, with Hornbostel increasingly
driving the theoretical framework. Hornbostel’s 1905 manifesto, “The problems of comparative
musicology”4 restated many of the key issues identified by Adler: evolution; relationships between
song, speech, instrumental music, dance; cross-cultural variation in perception (“listening to exotic
music with Western ears”). With audio recording a practical reality, Hornbostel’s attention also turned
to the benefits and challenges of this new technology, and the urgency of recordiing traditional music
before it disappeared: "The danger is great that the rapid dissemination of European culture will
destroy the remaining traces of ethnic singing and saying. We must save whatever can be saved before
the airship is added to the automobile and the electric express train...". We will see this fear as a
continuing motif in the history of comparative musicology (Huron, 2008; Lomax, 1977).

The Indigenous people being recorded may have themselves been responding to similar fears about
culture loss, but in ways that showed more agency and optimism. For instance, Philip Deloria, a
Professor of History at Harvard University of Dakota descent, interprets the photo shown in Fig. 2.4
not as Mountain Chief being a passive subject having his picture and voice preserved before his
culture was lost, but rather as an active agent using Frances Densmore to safeguard his culture for the
future (for more on Indigenous agency, see section 2.8):
A lot of folks who engage with these anthropologists and ethnographers are pretty explicit
about saying “You’re gonna be a repository…for me.” And I think the Native people who
were doing these recordings and giving up these objects for “safekeeping” a lot of times are
now reasonably seen as visionary, right? In the sense that…”we’re going to use these white
institutions, and 80 years, 90 years, 100 years down the road, we’re gonna come back for our
stuff. And our stuff is gonna be waiting for us.” (V. Brown, 2022: 07:03)

An important complement to the Berlin school’s work on audio recordings was their study of musical
instruments. Curt Sachs, who completed his PhD at the Berlin University, joined Hornbostel in 1914
to propose a classification of musical instruments still widely used today (Hornbostel & Sachs, 1961;
Kartomi, 2001). This scheme classifies instruments into one of four main types (with various sub-
types) based on their method of sound production: string (“chordophones”, e.g., zithers), air column
(“aerophones”, e.g. flutes), membrane (“membranophone”, e.g., drums), or instrument body
(“idiophones”, e.g., gongs). Sachs applied this scheme in various detailed surveys of instruments
across time and space, combining analysis of contemporary and archaeological museum specimens
with iconographic depictions of instruments in paintings, monuments, etc. (Sachs, 1940, 1943). Sachs
combined these instrumental surveys with research on traditional songs to propose ambitious theories
about the origins and evolution of music, such as the evolutionary origins of music in language
(“logogenic”) and/or emotion (“pathogenic”) (Sachs, 1962).

2.3 The folk revival and tune family research

While the Berlin school focused on cross-cultural scientific comparison of music to understand its
deep macroevolutionary origins, a parallel school was developing focused on within-culture musical
comparison to understand the microevolution of variations within “tune families” of related melodies
(analogous to families of related species or of languages). Just as we can compare DNA matches and
mismatches between humans and chimpanzees to analyze our evolutionary divergence, or compare
sound changes between Latin and its modern descendants (e.g., Latin “trēs” (three) vs. Spanish “tres”

4 English translations of the original German articles are compiled in (Hornbostel, 1975)

10
vs. Italian “tre”), musicologists and folklorists compared different versions of related melodies to
reconstruct their evolution.

At least three separate streams developed this idea in separate directions. One including Cecil Sharp,
Maud Karpeles, Samuel Bayard, and Bertrand Bronson, focused on traditional English folk songs
such as the “Child ballads” found to be flourishing in modified form across the Atlantic in the US
Appalachian mountains after having thought to have gone extinct in the British Isles (Sharp, 1932).
In the US, collectors like John and Alan Lomax recorded these English ballads and other folk songs
of rural America (African-American and Anglo-American), all of which helped sparked the US/UK
“folk revival” that played an important role in the history of popular music through their influence on
artists like Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez (Porter, 1991; Szwed,
2010). This stream saw some of the first applications of computational analysis to musicology, such
as when people like Milton Metfessel or Charles Seeger used automated “melographic” transcriptions
to analyze microtonality in folk songs (Metfessel, 1928; C. Seeger, 1951) (Fig. 2.5), or when Bertrand
Bronson created a system of coding melodies into punch-cards and mechanically sorting them into
related tune families (Bronson, 1949, 1969).

Figure 2.5. An example of an automated “melographic” representation of microvariation in

African-American spiritual singing (Metfessel, 1928). [public domain]

Back in continental Europe, scholars such as Bela Bartok and Walter Wiora applied this framework
to document and trace variation in the traditional melodies of their own languages as well as the ways
these melodies sometimes cross linguistic divides (analogous to the comparison of European folklore
by researchers such as the Grimm brothers). The same concept was also being explored in other non-
Western societies, such as the massive effort led by Japan’s Kasho MACHIDA to make audio
recordings and transcriptions (in Western staff notation) of thousands of different performances of
folk songs from all 57 prefectures in Japan (including Ryukyu and Ainu ethnic minorities in the far
southern and northern islands). Many of these large collections of thousands of melodies have
recently been digitized and analyzed using modern computational methods, as we will discuss in
section 2.6. (Panteli et al., 2018; Savage, 2022; Savage, Passmore, et al., 2022; Schaffrath, 1995;
Tierney et al., 2011; van Kranenburg et al., 2013, 2014).

2.4 Cantometrics

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One specific comparative musicological project is worth devoting its own section to due to its large
scale, controversial nature, and impact on modern comparative musicology: Alan Lomax’s
Cantometrics Project. Cantometrics (“canto” = song, “metrics” = measure) was a massive project
large enough to have numerous books and articles devoted to describing and critiquing it. Key
publications summarizing its methods, findings, and controversies were made by Lomax and his
many collaborators including Victor Grauer (co-inventor of the Cantometrics song classification
scheme), anthropologist Conrad Arensberg, and statisticians Norm Berkowitz and Edwin Erickson
(Erickson, 1976; V. A. Grauer, 2005, 2011; Lomax, 1968, 1976, 1980, 1989; Lomax & Arensberg,
1977; Lomax & Berkowitz, 1972). Lomax’s daughter, Anna Lomax Wood, myself, and many
collaborators have also published posthumous meta-reviews attempting to address and synthesize
many of the shorter critiques and controversies surrounding Cantometrics (Savage, 2018; Wood,
2018b, 2018a), republished Lomax’s detailed classification schemes and training tapes for coding
songs (Cantometrics), dance (Choreometrics), speech (Parlametrics), and more (Wood, 2020), and
digitized and published the full Cantometrics coded data and audio recordings in the form of the
“Global Jukebox”, containing over 5,000 songs from almost 1,000 societies (Wood et al., 2022) (Fig.
2.6).

Figure 2.6. Map of the Cantometric sample of over 5,000 songs from approximately 1,000
societies now digitized and available for listening and analysis at http://theglobaljukebox.org
(Wood et al., 2022). [CC BY at https://psyarxiv.com/4z97j]

To summarize, Lomax led a large team of collaborators to collect and curate this large sample of
traditional songs from throughout the world and analyze them according to the standardized
“Cantometric” classification scheme based on 37 variables of musical style. Importantly, while most
previous comparative musicologists focused on aspects of pitch and rhythm that can be transcribed
and compared using something approximating Western staff notation, Cantometrics was designed to
avoid transcribed notation and instead emphasize aspects of timbre (e.g., vocal nasality) and social
interaction (e.g., vocal blend; see Chapter 3 for more details and examples of Cantometric analysis).

12
Lomax compared the resulting cross-cultural similarities and differences to make broad conclusions
about the relationships between music and culture:
“The main findings of this study are two. First, the geography of song styles traces the main
paths of human migration and maps the known historical distributions of culture. Second,
some traits of song performance show a powerful relationship to features of social structure
that regulate interaction in all cultures.” (Lomax, 1968:3).

Many scholars were critical of one or both of these conclusions – even the Cantometrics Project’s
statistician, Erickson, whose reanalysis only strongly supported Lomax’s first claim regarding
historical migrations, not the second regarding relationships with social structure (Erickson, 1976).
Others were also sympathetic to Lomax’s goals, but were concerned about the reliability of his
methods, particularly the subjectivity and coarse grain of the coding scheme (e.g., classifying songs
on 3-5 point scales from “much” to “little” nasality, embellishment, vocal blend, etc.) and the
representativeness of the sample of recordings (Dubinskas, 1983; Maranda, 1970; Nettl, 1970).

Most importantly for the history of comparative musicology, some objections to Cantometrics were
less on methodological grounds and were more fundamentally opposed on political/epistemological
grounds to what they saw as its quantitative reductionism and ethnocentrism. For example, Steven
Feld (Feld, 1984) made an effort to apply Cantometrics to a sample of his own ethnographic
recordings from the Kaluli in Papua New Guinea, but concluded:
“I still feel that Lomax is asking many of the right questions about music and social
institutions, but the mechanics of cantometrics crunches them in ways that cannot satisfy the
researcher accustomed to intensive field work, in-depth analysis, and grounded ethnographic
theory ... My suggestion is true heresy to many committed comparativists, but I think we need
to pioneer a qualitative and intensive comparative sociomusicology.” (Feld, 1984)

Cantometrics combined elements of both the Berlin School and folk revival approaches to
comparison. Lomax studied directly with Sachs (who was living in New York after being exiled from
Berlin by the Nazis) and was influenced by Sachs’ broad, evolutionary frameworks for understanding
global music, dance, and aesthetic culture. At the same time, Lomax had also spent much time in the
field recording folk and traditional songs in rural America, the Caribbean, and Europe, and working
closely with scholars like Charles Seeger associated more with the tune family approach of
microvariation. Cantometrics represents a crucial turning point in the field because it represents the
most ambitious attempt at comprehensive cross-cultural comparison, and was met with overall
skepticism.

While even the most critical reviews (Maranda, 1970; Williams, 1974) acknowledged the value of
Cantometrics’ comparative methods and goals, few researchers besides Lomax and his team adopted
Cantometrics in their own work, and the project turned out to be the last major attempt at cross-
cultural scientific comparison for the rest of the 20th century. Lomax’s polarizing personality
undoubtedly played a role (A. Seeger, 2006; Szwed, 2010; Wood, 2018b), as did the fact that the raw
Cantometric data were never made available for others to analyze until 2021 (Wood et al., 2022). But
probably more important than these contingencies was the fact that the period during the 1950s and
1960s during which Lomax conceived and realized the Cantometrics project came at a turbulent time
in world history when radical change was afoot and the field was in the midst of an identity shift from
“comparative musicology” to “ethnomusicology”.

2.5 Transition from “comparative musicology” to “ethnomusicology”

It is well known that the field formerly known as “comparative musicology” changed its name to
“ethnomusicology” during the middle of the 20th century, most notably through the founding of the
Society for Ethnomusicology in 1955 (Merriam, 1977; Nettl & Bohlman, 1991; Stęszewski, 2020).
13
This shift paralleled a general move in cultural anthropology away from objective scientific
comparison from an evolutionary framework and towards qualitative ethnography that emphasized
cultural relativism and long-term fieldwork (Carneiro, 2003).

These new ethnomusicologists were critical of the “armchair ethnomusicology” of the Berlin School
comparative musicologists, who had scientifically analyzed the disembodied musical sounds of
distant cultures they had not personally experienced without necessarily understanding their cultural
context or what they meant to the musicians making it. Ethnomusicologists like John Blacking,
Mantle Hood, Bruno Nettl, and Alan Merriam instead pursued their own long-term fieldwork in
diverse societies to develop arguably one of the core insights of ethnomusicology: “music” is more
than just sound, but is linked to our social identities (ethnolinguistic, racial, gender, economic, etc.;
see (Rice, 2010) and replies for discussion). An influential formalization of this idea was Merriam’s
3-component model of music as including “sound”, “behavior”, and “meaning” (Merriam, 1964). For
some, the non-acoustic component of musical meaning became the only acceptable basis for cross-
cultural comparison:
"Statistical analyses of intervals...are all very well, provided that we know that the same
intervals have the same meanings in all the cultures whose music we are comparing. If this is
not the case, we may be comparing incomparable phenomena. In other words, if we accept
the view that patterns of music sound in any culture are the product of concepts and behaviour
peculiar to that culture, we cannot compare them with similar patterns in another culture
unless we know that the latter are derived from similar concepts and behaviour. Conversely,
statistical analyses may show that the music of 2 cultures is very different, but an analysis of
the cultural 'origins' of the sound patterns may reveal that they have essentially the same
meaning, which has been translated into the different 'languages' of the 2 cultures.”
(Blacking, 1966:218)

Notably, Merriam himself advocated cross-cultural statistical analysis of musical sound (Freeman &
Merriam, 1956). In his final publication, “On objections to comparison in ethnomusicology”, he
defended the value of cross-cultural comparison of musical sound and warned against “the danger of
throwing the baby of comparativism” out with the bathwater (Merriam, 1982). Nevertheless, later
ethnomusicologists increasingly emphasized non-acoustic aspects of music, leading some to criticize
“a growing reluctance to discuss musical sound at all” captured by the sarcastic label “eth-NO-
MUSIC-ology" (Miller & Shahriari, 2021:xi).

One important factor pushing researchers to choose a new name was that World War II had just ended
and the horrors of the Nazi regime’s racist genocide made clear to all (Schneider, 2006). Scholars
across many fields began to reflect on the role their fields played in legitimizing racism, as many have
done again following the Black Lives Matter movement (Rehding, 2000; Saini, 2020). But the details
do not suggest such a simple association between comparative musicology and Nazi-ism. For starters,
while Berlin was the centre of early comparative musicology, several of its key figures were
themselves forced to flee Nazi Germany due to their Jewish ancestry (e.g., Hornbostel, Sachs). On a
practical level, the exile of key comparative Berlin School comparative musicologists and the ensuing
Cold War chaos of occupied, divided Berlin (including the relocation and partial loss of the Berlin
Phonogramm-Archiv) also contributed to the demise of the Berlin School and the use of the term
“comparative musicology”.

2.6 Rise of music cognition and music information retrieval

As ethnomusicology increasingly turned away from cross-cultural scientific comparison during the
second half of the 20th century, scientific approaches to understanding music began to crystallize in
two new fields: music cognition and music information retrieval (MIR). Both fields were inspired by
14
the “cognitive revolution” and its connection to the new technology of computers (G. A. Miller,
2003). Key events include the founding of the journals Psychology of Music (1973), Music
Perception (1983), and Computing in Musicology (1985); the Society for Music Perception and
Cognition (SMPC; 1980), the first International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition
(ICMPC; Kyoto, Japan 1989), and the first International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval
(ISMIR; MA, USA, 2000; later re-branding the same initials as the International Society for Music
Information Retrieval) (Burgoyne et al., 2015; Hewlett & Selfridge-Field, 1991; ICMPC Advisory
Board, 2022).

Both fields can trace their roots back to the earlier comparative musicologists – music cognition
through the influence of psychologists like Helmholtz and Stumpf discussed in Section 2.2, and music
information retrieval through the influence of automated musical transcription and comparison
discussed in Section 2.3. Both new fields initially focused primarily on Western popular and art music.
This was partly due to the challenges of cross-cultural comparison, and partly to the higher prestige
and economic value associated with Western music.

Exceptions to this Western-centric tendency have increasingly begun to emerge (for review, see)
(Gómez et al., 2013; Jacoby et al., 2020; Savage, 2022; Stevens, 2012; Thompson et al., 2019). Some
of this may be spurred by the publication of Henrich et al.’s (Henrich et al., 2010) influential article
highlighting the dangers of relying on research limited to “WEIRD” (Western, Educated, Industrial,
Rich, Democratic) societies. Another important reason is the resurgence of interest in the evolution
of music/musicality and the realization that understanding musical evolution requires an
understanding of what is universal about music (Honing, 2018; Wallin et al., 2000).

Several of the more influential exceptions have focused on the controversial connection between
musical sound and emotional meaning. Balkwill & Thompson (Balkwill & Thompson, 1999) found
that naïve listeners were able to use acoustic cues to identify some – but not all – intended emotions
in North Indian classical (Hindustani) music. In particular, tempo was a reliable predictor of “joy”,
while “peacefulness” of raga (analogous to scales) was not reliably perceived by listeners unfamiliar
with Hindustani music. Other influential studies have disagreed whether such sound-emotion
associations are universal: Fritz et al. (Fritz et al., 2009) argued based on perceptual experiments with
the Mafa (Cameroon) that “consonance and permanent sensory dissonance universally influence the
perceived pleasantness of music”. In contrast, McDermott et al. (McDermott et al., 2016) argued
based on perceptual experiments with the Tsimane’ (Bolivian Amazon) that consonance was
“unlikely to reflect innate biases” (see Chapter 5 for further discussion of the universality of
consonance).

2.7 Comparative musicology in the 21st century

2.7.1 Analytical Approaches to World Music

As cross-cultural musical comparison was increasingly appearing in psychology and computer
science in the 21st century, a “new comparative musicology” was beginning to re-emerge from within
(ethno)musicology/music theory. Some dissatisfied with the previously mentioned resistance to sonic
analysis of non-Western music (e.g., “eth-NO-MUSIC-ology”) began a movement toward
“Analytical Approaches to World Music” (AAWM) This was the name chosen for a conference series
and associated journal that began in 2010 and has expanded into a variety of conferences, journals,
and books under the umbrella of the International Foundation for the Theory and Analysis of World

15
Musics (IFTAWM), led by Lawrence Shuster (The International Foundation for the Theory and
Analysis of World Musics, 2022) 5.

The AAWM movement was influenced in name and vision by the work of ethnomusicologist and
composer Michael Tenzer, especially a two-volume set of books he co-edited with music theorist
John Roeder entitled “Analytical [and cross-cultural] studies in world music” (Tenzer, 2006; Tenzer
& Roeder, 2011). The series takes an approach that revives the interest of early comparative
musicologists in cross-cultural analysis of musical sound, but from a more focused perspective , with
each of the 20 main chapters authored by a different expert(s) who has spent substantial time
understanding the musics of a given culture on its own terms. Thus, each chapter uses some kind of
visual representation of musical sound – often this includes traditional Western staff notation, but not
always – for example, Widdess’s chapter analysing an unmetred Hindustani alap improvisation uses
a non-traditional notation that allows him to visualize the microtonal improvisations of the sitar
player in ways that Western staff notation is not well-suited for. Importantly, the series includes
Western and classical and popular music as well as traditional non-Western music. For example, one
chapter analyses a Mozart piano concerto, another chamber music by Elliot Carter, another a jazz
improvisation by Thelonious Monk, another a polyphonic hunting song of Aka Central African
hunter-gatherers, and so on.

Most relevant from the perspective of comparative musicology is Tenzer’s afterword to the 2nd
volume. While each main chapter focuses only on a detailed analysis of the musical sound and cultural
context of a single composition, Tenzer’s afterword synthesizes and compares across these 20
examples to propose a “cross-cultural typology of time” (Tenzer, 2011) (Fig. 2.7).

Figure 2.7. Tenzer’s (2011) “cross-cultural topology of musical time” comparing 20 musical
works from around the world (grouped into 10 categories: A-J). [Fig. A.2; permission pending]

One could question Tenzer’s choice to prioritize time over pitch, timbre, etc., or compare the relative
strengths and weaknesses of his rhythmic classification scheme against Cantometrics or alternative
methods. In Chapter 3 I directly compare Tenzer’s typology of the 20 works with Cantometrics and
other alternative methods to do precisely this. But regardless of the relative strengths and weaknesses
of Tenzer’s method, the simple fact that Tenzer attempted to compare 20 diverse musical works in a
quasi-quantitative manner (the figure can be interpreted as a graph with the x-axis representing
“transformational character” and the y-axis “time organization”) was extremely unusual and daring
at the time.

Another important comparative musicological article was published in the journal Analytical
Approaches to World Music: Andrew Killick’s (2021) proposal for a universal “global music
notation”. Killick reviews the limits of Western staff notation and proposes a new system that keeps
many of the useful features of Western staff notation (e.g., quantization of pitch and rhythm into
culturally meaningful categories), but avoids the trap of forcing these categories to conform only to
Western equal-tempered chromatic tuning or isochronous meters. Instead, Killick’s global notation
attempts to combine some of the benefits of automatic transcription described in section 2.3 with the

5The founders who chose this title have acknowledged that the term “world music” remains problematic due its
origins as a commercial term to lump all non-Western musics together. Yet they also concluded that there was not a
better term available. They use the term “world music” to include all of the world’s music, including Western classical
and other musics. As I recall one organizer, Kalin Kirilov, putting it during the opening of the first AAWM conference in
2010: “There’s this thing called the world, and it has music in it. That’s what I mean by “world music”. Notably,
however, the new IFTAWM uses the plural term “world musics”, which some feel carries less negative baggage than
the singular “world music”.
16
benefits of traditional staff notation by allowing the user to vary the tuning of relevant scale degrees
(vertical axis) and the timing of relevant metric values (horizontal axis), overlaying automated
transcriptions and manually segmented notation. Killick illustrates his approach using several of the
examples taken from Tenzer’s set of 20 works described above (Tenzer & Roeder, 2011) (Fig. 2.7b).

Figure 2.7. An example using Killick’s (2021) “global music notation” to analyze an excerpt of
the Karnatak (South Indian classical) Varnam used as one of the examples in (Tenzer & Roeder,
2011). [Fig. 12b; permission pending]

2.7.2 A “new comparative musicology”

Perhaps by coincidence, the first AAWM conference in 2010 also happened to be the first academic
conference I ever attended. I had just started my graduate studies in 2009 as a Master’s student in
Steven Brown’s NeuroArts Lab in McMaster University’s Department of Psychology, Neuroscience
and Behaviour. I had cold emailed Steven after reading the now-classic book he co-edited entitled
“The origins of music” (Wallin et al., 2000). When I read this in 2008, I was a recent graduate of
Amherst College on a 1-year fellowship at Doshisha University in Japan learning traditional Japanse
music (shamisen, koto, noh utai) after having done a summer research internship in a biochemistry
lab and an honours thesis in music composition (thesis title: “The Calvin & Hobbes Suite”, for big
band and choir). I read The Origins of Music as I was struggling to reconcile my seemingly conflicting
interests in science, music, and cross-cultural diversity. Seeing that there was a whole group of
researchers out there who were combining these ideas was a “Eureka” moment for me. Steven
responded to my email to say he was looking for a graduate student to work on a project he’d recently
submitted a grant proposal involving using Cantometrics to compare musical and genetic diversity
among indigenous Taiwanese societies, and asked if I’d like to apply to graduate school to work on
it with him6. Despite not having taken a single undergraduate course in psychology, I applied and was
accepted to start a fully funded Masters in September 2009. So my reading The origins of music and
cold emailing Steven would turn out to have a major impact on my career, and by extension the
history of comparative musicology. So my advice to prospective researchers is: send that unsolicited
email!

My time officially supervised by Steven was a mere two years from 2009-2011. As I learned about
the history of comparative musicology through the course of our research, I came to understand and
appreciate the critique of “armchair ethnomusicology” by the Berlin School comparative
musicologists. The same critique could be fairly applied to me, sitting in a psychology lab in Canada
analyzing the songs of indigenous peoples in Taiwan I had never met and whose languages I didn’t
understand. I was pleased that when I did finally get the chance to meet members of these
communities at a conference in Taiwan on “Mapping and Unmapping the Pacific” they seemed to
appreciate our interest and attempts to study their music. Nevertheless, I felt the need to learn more
about ethnomusicology and learn more about the details of a musical culture on its own terms. Since
my wife is Japanese, I had studied Japanese since age 14, and we had been hoping to live in Japan
eventually, we decided rather than continue with a PhD in psychology with Steven in Canada I would
apply to do a PhD in ethnomusicology in Japan at the Tokyo University of the Arts. This also required
me to start my graduate studies over from scratch in a sense with another Masters, this time in
ethnomusicology. But since I received a fully funded scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of
Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT), this was not so bad. In fact, later I

6Original collaborators on the project included ethnomusicologists Ying-fen Wang (an expert in Taiwanese traditional
music) and Victor Grauer (Cantometrics co-inventor, who after Lomax’s death in 2002 had been inspired by recent
advances in genetic anthropology to compare Cantometric and genetic data to track ancient human migrations
(Callaway, 2007; V. A. Grauer, 2006, 2011). However both ethnomusicologists ultimately declined coauthorship
because they felt they hadn’t been appropriately included as genuine collaborators.
17
came to appreciate the extra time as a funded graduate student where I could focus on my own
research without worrying about teaching, grant writing, etc.

My supervisor at Tokyo University of the Arts was Yukio Uemura, but his style was very hands-off7,
so I continued to collaborate closely with Steven, who acted as almost a de facto supervisor. In total
Steven and I co-authored 10 journal articles stemming from those formative 2009-2014 years. The
most relevant from the perspective of comparative musicology were our position paper described in
the introduction entitled “Toward a new comparative musicology” (Savage & Brown, 2013) and our
empirical analysis “Statistical universals reveal the structures and functions of human music”
(Savage, Brown, et al., 2015), co-authored with my fellow Tokyo University of the Arts
ethnomusicology Master’s student Emi Sakai and with Tom Currie, an expert in state-of-the-art
phylogenetic methods for quantitative analysis of cross-cultural data. This latter paper has had a
particularly large impact –indeed, it has been among the highest-cited of all papers published since
2015 across all fields of music studies.

This paper takes a data-driven approach that is similar in some ways to the first empirical comparative
musicological analysis we looked at in this chapter: Ellis’s 1885 cross-cultural analysis of scale
tunings. Indeed, like Ellis and Hipkins, me and my co-author Emi Sakai relied on our own ears to
analyze recordings of diverse musics around the world. In this case our recordings were the 304
companion recordings to the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (Nettl et al., 1998) (Fig. 2.8).
Rather than a specific focus on scale tunings, however, we tested a broad range of potential universal
aspects of music, based on the 72 recently proposed by Steven Brown and ethnomusicologists Joseph
Jordania ((S. Brown & Jordania, 2013). These included scales, but also rhythms, timbres, instruments,
and factors of cultural context such as the number of performers and their sexes. Our analysis methods
combined the Hornbstel-Sachs instrument classification scheme and Cantometrics song style
classification schemes previously discussed, as well as CantoCore, a scheme I proposed that adapted
and supplemented Cantometrics’s structural features with some missing features, such as for aspects
of scale structure (Savage et al., 2012).

7 Usually I would reach out to Prof. Uemura around once a year to arrange a one-on-one meeting, the result of which
was usually along the lines of “keep up the good work”. But his advice had a high signal-to-noise ratio, and some of his
feedback was crucial toward enabling me to organize fieldwork in Iwate and to change the focus of my PhD from
music and migration to cultural evolution of music, and he encouraged me to apply for and successfully nominated me
for my 2017 Ikushi Prize from the Japanese Emperor. And I think his hands-off approach was crucial to developing my
own independent research program, which served me well after my PhD. Thanks Uemura-sensei!
18
Figure 2.8. Our (Savage, Brown, et al., 2015) analysis identifying “statistical universals” in the
world’s music. A) Our sample of 304 audio recordings from the Garland Encyclopedia of World
Music. B) Frequencies of 32 putative universal features in each of the 9 world regions (adjusted
for historical relationships between societies). 18 “statistical universals” predominant in all nine
regions are highlighted with boxes.

Importantly, while both we and Ellis documented a lack of “absolute universals” present in all musical
examples studied, our interpretations were radically different. Where Ellis interpreted his data as
showing that musical scales were not universal or “natural”, we argued that the 18 individual musical
features and the network of 10 inter-related musical features we found to predominate in all of nine
world regions represented “statistical universals”, and speculated that “These cross-cultural structural
regularities of human music may relate to roles in facilitating group coordination and cohesion, as
exemplified by the universal tendency to sing, play percussion instruments, and dance to simple,
repetitive music in groups.” (Savage, Brown, et al., 2015).

We see this as not the final word on musical universals or their significance to evolution, but rather
the reopening of old debates with new data and methods. Chapter 4 will discuss more details of these
debates, including criticisms of our sampling scheme (Mehr et al., 2018; Trehub, 2015), alternative
interpretations of the evolutionary significance of musical universals (Mehr et al., 2021; Savage et
al., 2021; and the 60 commentaries by 109 authors accompanying these two target articles); and the
political and disciplinary implications of a “new comparative musicology” (Clarke, 2014; V. Grauer,
2014; Locke, 2014).
19
2.7.3 Music perception among the Tsimane’ and beyond

The year after our article on statistical universals was published, MIT neuroscientist Josh McDermott
led a study published in Nature arguing against universals in music perception entitled “Indifference
to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception” (McDermott et
al., 2016). McDermott collaborated with anthropologists from Baylor University, Brandeis
University, and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile’s Center for Intercultural and Indigenous
Research to show that members of the Tsimane’, an indigenous Amazonian society with minimal
exposure to Western harmony, did not necessarily show preferences for musical intervals traditionally
deemed “consonant” or pleasant in Western music. Like Ellis, this challenged Helmholtz’s
conceptions of consonance as universal, but in an even more direct way by measuring consonance
preferences rather than indirectly by measuring scale tunings. Interestingly, McDermott et al.
demonstrated very similar disliking in both Tsimane’ and American participants for the “2 nd”
harmonic intervals traditionally considered most dissonant in Western theory (i.e., two notes differing
in frequency by 100 or 200 cents played simultaneously). However, when such 2 nd intervals were
played using a “dichotic” presentation (one note heard in the right headphone, the other in the left
headphone), the Tsimane’ no longer disliked these intervals, while US participants disliked the
dichotic versions almost as much as the standard “diotic” presentation (both notes heard in both ears;
Fig. 2.9).

Figure 2.9. McDermott et al.’s (2016) data from perceptual experiments with US participants
and indigenous Tsimane’ with minimal exposure to Western music. Data showing both cross-
cultural variation and consistency in aesthetic reactions to harmonic intervals, depending on
whether they were presented “dichotically” (one note in each headphone ear) or “diotically”
(both notes in both ears) . [Fig. 3f; permission pending]

This dichotic/diotic difference is crucial because one of the major mechanisms proposed to explain a
biological basis of consonance preferences is harmonic roughness, the phenomenon where two notes
with similar frequencies overlap and interfere to produce a “beating” sensation (Plomp & Levelt,
1965). Listening to the two notes in separate ears means their acoustic properties are initially
processed in different parts of the brain and do not interfere to produce roughness, allowing the
experimenters to isolate the effects of (biologically-based) harmonic roughness from other factors
that may reflect cultural exposure. This elegant experiment suggested a biological basis for the
phenomenon of harmonic roughness proposed to explain consonance preferences, while also
demonstrating how this biological component could not explain a substantial amount of the observed
cross-cultural variation in consonance preferences (e.g., the Tsimane’ did not share the US
participants’ aversion to the tritone (6 semitones; cf. Fig. 2.9).

The article had a major impact, including news reports in prominent outlets such as The Atlantic and
the Washington Post (Kaplan, 2016; Yong, 2016). Several researchers, including myself, have
criticized the interpretation of these data as overemphasizing the cross-cultural differences and under-
emphasizing the similarities (Bowling et al., 2017; Savage & Currie, 2016), just as I have criticized
Ellis of doing 130 years earlier. But such debate does not change the fact that McDermott et al.’s
experiments show convincing empirical evidence of surprising differences and intriguing similarities
in cross-cultural music perception.

Since this 2016 study, a number of studies from McDermott and his current and former trainees have
documented additional intriguing cross-cultural similarities and differences in music perception
among the Tsimane’ and in other populations around the world, particularly in a series of studies led
20
by Nori Jacoby and Melinda McPherson (Jacoby et al., 2019, 2021; Jacoby & McDermott, 2017;
McPherson et al., 2020). These later papers have tended to present a more nuanced interpretation of
the complex interaction between biological and cultural factors, as reflected in titles such as
“Universal and non-universal features of musical pitch perception revealed by singing” and
“Universality and cross-cultural variation in mental representations of music revealed by global
comparison of rhythm priors”.

This latest paper is particularly noteworthy because, rather than comparing only one Western and one
non-Western population as is commonly done, Jacoby and McDermott led a massive global effort to
collect data from 923 participants from 39 groups in 15 countries (USA, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia,
UK, Sweden, Bulgaria, Turkey, Mali, Botswana, Namibia, India, S. Korea, Japan, China). These
included indigenous participants like the Tsimane’ and urban participants like Japanese university
students, with participants sampled to include relatively balanced representation of those with and
without training in their local traditional musics. They did this through collaboration with 34
scientists, ethnomusicologists, and musicians from around the world (including myself). This
collaboration produced strong evidence for a universal bias toward rhythmic patterns with small-
integer ratios (e.g., 1:2, 2:3) found in all participant groups, while the precise combination of these
ratios (e.g., 1-1-2; 3-3-2, etc.) showed substantial cross-cultural variation (Fig. 2.10).

21
Figure 2.10. Sampling locations and data from 923 participants from 15 countries in Jacoby et
al.’s global study of rhythm perception (Jacoby et al., 2021). [CC BY at
https://psyarxiv.com/b879v]

2.7.4 The “Natural History of Song” project

22
Soon after our PNAS paper on statistical universals and McDermott et al.’s Nature paper on Tsimane’
consonance preferences, Samuel Mehr, Manvir Singh, and Luke Glowacki (all Harvard graduate
students at the time) led a project that became the most controversial comparative musicological
research since Cantometrics: the “Natural History of Song”. First, they reported in the journal Current
Biology, (Mehr & Singh et al., 2018) that 750 online listeners could identify unfamiliar lullabies,
dance songs, and healing songs at above-chance levels from a corpus of 118 recordings of traditional
songs from 86 societies (Fig. 2.11; note that listeners were NOT able to reliably identify a fourth
song-type: love songs). They interpreted these findings as evidence of “universal form-function links
in human song”. The following year, they published another article with 19 authors in the journal
Science replicating these findings with 29,357 online listeners, supplementing these naïve raters with
additional analyses using expert codings, staff notation transcriptions, and automated algorithms, and
adding text mining of ethnographic publications on the 60 societies in the Human Relations Area
Files (HRAF) “Probability Sample”. These new analyses confirmed the presence of music in all
observed societies8, identified 20 behavioral contexts cross-culturally associated with singing (e.g.,
dance, storytelling, ritual), and statistical regularities in melodic and rhythmic structure.

Figure 2.11. Online listeners were able to identify unfamiliar dance songs, lullabies, and healing
songs (but not love songs) from diverse cultures at levels greater than chance (Mehr & Singh et
al., 2018). [Fig. 2; permission pending]

Even before these articles were published, the Natural History of Song project had already elicited a
backlash from many ethnomusicologists, beginning in 2016 when Mehr put out a call to the Society
for Ethnomusicology email list-serv “SEM-L” for ethnomusicologists to contribute field recordings
and/or help code these recordings. Reactions were diverse and included both praise and criticism on
a range of methodological issues (e.g., appropriateness of relying on Western staff notation
transcriptions or sampling bias in collecting ratings from online listeners) and theoretical issues (e.g.,
context within the history of comparative musicology; cf. (Loughridge, 2021) for thoughtful
discussion). Overall, a common concern was that the Natural History of Song might be recapitulating
Cantometrics without learning from its mistakes. Among dozens of emails exchanged in the debate
on SEM-L, one by Matt Sakakeeny on Sep 17, 2016 captures common concerns succinctly enough
to be worth quoting in full:

There has been an active discussion of the Natural History of Song database among
ethnomusicologists on social media and much of it has been negative. Without singling you
out in any way, or taking credit or blame for these discussions as my own, I would like to take
the opportunity to relate some of our shared misgivings.

If you are using Murdock's HRAF to conduct a globally comparative study of song to
determine "whether there is underlying structure to the world’s music and how that structure
varies across human cultures" then you are extending or otherwise developing upon Lomax's
theory of Cantomet[r]ics. Period. There is no mention of Cantometrics that I can find
anywhere in your materials, which cannot help but raise ethical issues of academic citation
and honesty. Because Lomax was a social scientist, and the Natural History team is led
primarily by cognitive scientists, the marginalization of Cantometrics perpetuates not only
the historic divide between these sectors but their massive imbalance of power within the
university9.

8 Mehr et al. also confirmed the presence of music in each of a larger sample of 315 HRAF societies.
9 When reviewing this chapter, Singh and Glowacki noted that their training was primarily in anthropology, not
cognitive science. In response, Sakakeeny noted that the bulk of NHS’s funding came via a >$2million National
Institute of Health (NIH) grant via Harvard’s Psychology Department, which is also where the two NHS faculty
23
 This is particularly significant here because there is a four decade history of critique of
Cantometrics within the social sciences that the Natural History of Song project appears to
ignore. Claims of the universality of music based on the coding of quantitative data are widely
discredited in countless case studies that demonstrate how complexities of social identity,
individual subjectivity, and relations of power challenge comparative methods. A big data
project under the umbrella term of "Natural History," denying human agency and geopolitics
in its very title, will face challenges in recruiting ethnomusic[o]logists as assistants.

If there were requests for assistance in envisioning this project, and an opportunity to shape
its research agenda and methods more inclusively, I missed it. I am the last person to claim
expertise on comparative study but I feel compelled to speak directly because I hope you might
understand the projection of power and hubris that this initiative makes to many of us. This
extends to issues of gender of inclusion within your groups of Leadership (all men),
Collaborators (all men), Consultants (both men) and then Staff (all women) and Research
Assistants (majority women).

While the published versions that appeared several years later did include female (and non-binary)
coauthors and citations of Lomax, this did little to appease Sakakeeny or many other
ethnomusicologists. When several ethnomusicologists were asked for comment on their Current
Biology article by The Atlantic and the New York Times ” (Marshall, 2018; Yong, 2018), I was the
only one to give a positive assessment of it as “a very thorough and important [study that] gets us a
little closer to answering the really important and controversial questions of whether there’s anything
universal about beauty or meaning in music, and why music evolved”. The other ethnomusicologists
quoted – Sakakeeny, David Locke, and outgoing President of the Society for Ethnomusicology Anne
Rasmussen – were all critical of the article. Rasmussen in particular described it as “extraordinarily
imperialist, and essentialist”, and disagreed with its basic conclusions, saying “While music is
universal, its meaning is not”. A lengthier critique by Rasmussen was featured later that year in a
special section of the Society for Ethnomusicology Newsletter critiquing the Current Biology paper
(Rasmussen & Cowdery, 2018). Here Rasmussen also critiqued Mehr et al.’s lack of engagement
with the history of comparative musicology and ethnomusicology, writing: “where is there, in this
study, either a discussion of Cantometrics, designed by Alan Lomax, and the miles of discursive
evaluation generated by his experiments, or reference to any other scholarship on universals in music
from our field?".

Later criticism following the 2019 Science article’s publication was largely conducted on Twitter in
response to Mehr’s announcement of the paper, which began: ‘in 1835, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
called music “the universal language of mankind”. he turned out to have been right.’ (Mehr, 2019).
Much of the accompanying media coverage also echoed this idea of music as a “universal language”
(e.g., Woo, 2019), even though the Science article only provides evidence for music being universal
(which was already widely accepted), not that it is a “language” (which is generally rejected - see Ch.
4).

I do agree with some of these criticisms, but I think some are overstated or undercontextualized. So
in defence of NHS:
1) Some criticism of NHS was factually incorrect or exaggerated. For example, contrary to
Rasmussen’s claims, Mehr et al. did cite research on musical universals by Lomax and other
ethnomusicologists, albeit only briefly without discussing Cantometrics (e.g., “researchers

“Consultants” (Steven Pinker and Max Krasnow) were based, so his larger point about imbalances of power within the
university remains.
24
 have proposed a number of potential universals in music and musical behavior [27–29]…”
(Mehr & Singh et al., 2018).
2) While it was a strategic blunder to open the Twitter announcement with Longfellow’s
“universal language” quote, the article never actually claimed that music was literally a
“universal language”.
3) The harshest charges, such as the NHS being “colonialist and essentialist”, have not been
accompanied by any details of how the project matches this description or how it is any worse
than most other ethnomusicological/comparative musicological research (see Section 2.8 on
the debate about decolonizing ethnomusicology in general). For example, NHS is actually the
only major comparative musicological study reviewed in this chapter to include a non-white
researcher in a leadership position (NHS co-Director Singh is of South Asian heritage and
was co-first author on the Current Biology paper and co-corresponding author on the Science
paper).
4) Many negative reactions by ethnomusicologists focused not on the substantive findings but
rather on the lack of collaboration or engagement with ethnomusicologists, which could be
seen as territorialism by ethnomusicologists frustrated at outsiders infringing on our “turf”. I
admit that some of my own frustrations with the project may stem from the fact that those of
us who provided expert codings for it were not offered coauthorship 10. Ironically, we may
have experienced something similar to what many subjects of ethnomusicological studies
experience: we were paid and thanked in the Acknowledgments section for providing data,
but our contributions were not deemed worthy of coauthorship and the intellectual partnership
that coauthorship entails (see Section 2.8 for further discussion of this point).
5) While their main claim – namely that music is found universally in all human societies – was
always assumed even by the most sceptical ethnomusicologists (e.g., List, 1971, who wrote
that "...the only universal aspect of music seems to be that most people make it."), they did
provide the first large-scale empirical documentation of this important point.

I have publicly praised the Current Biology article (see above) and recommended publication of the
Science article as one of the peer reviewers. But like all the research reviewed here, it has limitations
that future comparative musicologists should aim to improve on. Relatively minor suggestions for
how the NHS studies might be improved on include some that we previously adopted in our 2015
PNAS paper like discussing definitions of the key terms “music” and “universal”, or using a more
diverse sample by including instrumental music, contemporary genres, and large-scale societies in
addition to traditional songs from small-scale societies. More specific to NHS, I hope future research
can clarify an unresolved tension between the main finding of their Current Biology paper- that
listeners can identify unfamiliar genres by their structural features (cf. Fig. 2.11) – and data from their
Science paper showing that these structural features are “mostly unrelated to the behavioral contexts
of the songs” (cf. Fig. 2.12).

10To be clear, there was no expectation of authorship when we volunteered to participate, and my own request for
coauthorship was politely declined (with an offer to discuss future collaborations) before I began my own codings.
25
Figure 2.12. A principal component analysis of the 118 songs in the Natural History of Song
Discography shows that songs do not cluster by genre (Mehr et al., 2019). [CC BY at
https://psyarxiv.com/emq8r/]

Perhaps the biggest limitation that applies to almost all the research reviewed so far is the asymmetry
between the researchers and the researched. Studies like Ellis’s scale tunings, Cantometrics, our
Garland analysis, or the Natural History of Song provide crucial data on cross-cultural musical
diversity, but our data is almost entirely filtered through the ears, brains, and epistemologies of the
predominantly Western researchers and listeners who have converted the audio recordings into
standardized formats like Cantometric codings or transcriptions in staff notation. I believe the future
of comparative musicology lies in addressing this imbalance to include more diverse voices and
perspectives from throughout the world.

2.8 Comparative musicology in the pandemic era: On racism, decolonization, coauthorship, and
“helicopter research”

This whirlwind review of over a century of comparative musicology only scratches at the surface of
where the field has come from and where it might be going. The good news is that we have seen a
renaissance of comparative musicological studies from both humanistic and scientific perspectives,
bringing new technologies and paradigms (e.g., global notation, phylogenetic analysis, automated
acoustic analysis, neuroscience experiments) to old questions about musical universals and cross-
cultural diversity.

The bad news, in my opinion, is that scientists and humanists alike – including myself – have yet to
overcome the colonial legacies of comparative musicology. Most crucially, despite the many
methodological and theoretical developments over the last century, the vast majority of comparative
musicology we have reviewed has been authored mostly by white men from so-called “WEIRD”
(Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic (Henrich et al., 2010)) societies. This problem
is by no means unique to comparative musicology: many fields from the humanities and sciences are
increasingly grappling with their own colonial legacies and their impact on diversity, equity, and
inclusion.

26
An issue particularly relevant for comparative musicology is so-called “helicopter research”, defined
in a 2022 Nature editorial as:
when researchers from high-income settings, or who are otherwise privileged, conduct studies
in lower-income settings or with groups who are historically marginalized, with little or no
involvement from those communities or local researchers in the conceptualization, design,
conduct or publication of the research. (Nature Editors, 2022).
This can be seen as a cross-culturally specific version of disability rights activist Jame Charlton’s
memorable phrase: “nothing about us without us” (Charlton, 1998). Nature’s “helicopter research”
definition probably applies to almost all of the studies reviewed in this chapter, and also to the vast
majority of published ethnomusicological and anthropological studies. Indeed, “helicopter research”
was effectively institutionalized in ethnomusicology programmes, which traditionally required
graduate students to conduct fieldwork in remote, less privileged societies and publish the results as
sole-authored dissertations, books, and/or journal articles (Nettl, 2015).

A movement against helicopter research and against inequality and racism in academia more
generally had been building for decades (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Studies (AIATSIS), 2020; Smith, 1999; South African San Institute, 2017), but the movement
accelerated sharply following the “Black Lives Matter” protests triggered by the 2020 murder of
George Floyd during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, leading scientific
journals such as Nature, Current Biology, PLoS Computational Biology and Nature Human
Behaviour have published editorials and opinion pieces discouraging the practice (Haelewaters et al.,
2021; Nature Editors, 2022; Stefanoudis et al., 2021; Urassa et al., 2021). Often the country of co-
author affiliations is used as a proxy for local community involvement for the purposes of specific
editorial policies (e.g., journals discourage publishing primary data from countries when none of the
authors’ affiliations are from that country), although this is acknowledged to often be an overly blunt
proxy (Urassa et al., 2021).

Seen from this context, the mid-20th focus on shifting from quantitative, comparative analysis to
qualitative, ethnographic analysis with little corresponding emphasis on who is doing the analysis
seems naive. From a helicopter research perspective, classic ethnomusicological studies by Lomax’s
critics who were also white men from Western institutions (e.g., John Blacking’s studies of Venda
music in South Africa (Blacking, 1971) or Steven Feld’s studies of Kaluli music in Papua New Guinea
(Feld, 1984)) are no better than Lomax’s Cantometrics. Indeed, three weeks after Floyd’s murder,
Danielle Brown (D. Brown, 2020) wrote a blog post entitled “An open letter on racism in music
studies: Especially ethnomusicology and music education”, where she specifically called out the
Society for Ethnomusicology:
“an organization, whose predominantly white members by and large research people of color,
is and can be nothing other than a colonialist and imperialist enterprise. Period. It is a hard
pill to swallow but swallow we must. No matter how hard we try to convince ourselves
otherwise, until ethnomusicology as a field is dismantled or significantly restructured, so that
epistemic violence against BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color] is not normalized,
Black lives do not matter.”
Brown’s post triggered intense debate, especially within the Society for Ethnomusicology, leading
among other things to the resignation of its (white, male) President (Averill et al., 2020). Around the
same time, other scholars were calling out issues of diversity and inclusion in related areas of music
studies – for example Dylan Robinson’s book Hungry listening: Resonant theory for indigenous
sound studies; the International Council for Traditional Music’s year-long series of 24
“Decolonization Dialogues” (International Council for Traditional Music, 2021); the Society for
Music Perception and Cognition board’s statement on “Embracing anti-racist practices in the music
perception and cognition community” (Baker et al., 2020), and Philip Ewell’s article in Music Theory
Online entitled “Music theory and the white racial frame” (Ewell, 2020). Ewell’s article even spurred
27
controversy reaching as far as the pages of the New York Times and Fox News (Betz, 2020; Powell,
2021).

I should emphasize that much of my own research could be seen as “helicopter research”. Perhaps
the clearest example would be my 2015 article entitled “How circumpolar is Ainu music? Musical
and genetic perspectives on the history of the Japanese archipelago” (Savage, Matsumae, et al., 2015).
This article was authored by me and seven other researchers, none of whom were Ainu. At the time
I thought of this as a progressive attempt at interdisciplinary collaboration between
ethnomusicologists (me, Matt Gillan), geneticists (Hiroki Ota, Hiromi Matsumae, Atsushi Tajima,
Mark Stoneking) and other scientists (my neuroscientist MSc supervisor Steven Brown and cultural
evolutionary anthropologist Tom Currie), combining quantitative analysis of Cantometric/CantoCore
codings of 680 songs from 35 societies with photos/video from my fieldwork with Ainu musicians.
After moving to Japan in 2011 I had become friends with a number of Ainu musicians and spent
much time learning music from them, living together for several weeks as a volunteer for an Ainu art
festival in Hokkaido, discussing my research with them, and later inviting them to give (paid)
workshops and concerts (e.g., (Savage et al., 2020). They found my interest in quantitative
comparison of musical, genetic, and other cultural data worth encouraging and not at all intrinsically
offensive, but declined offers for formal collaboration as coauthors on the article because they didn’t
feel it made sense. They were not researchers, didn’t understand the details of the quantitative
analysis, didn’t speak English, and didn’t see how their being coauthors would help anyone except as
a form of tokenism. So although I believe I tried to do my research ethically and intended to help the
Ainu and other communities by studying and promoting their music and culture, at the end of the day
it is still true that I essentially failed to genuinely involve members of the Ainu community (or any
of the other indigenous circumpolar communities whose music we analyzed, such as the Inuit, Nivkh,
or Saami) “in the conceptualization, design, conduct or publication of the research”, and thus meet
Nature’s definition of “helicopter research”.

Thus, I think I join almost all the other researchers whose work I have reviewed in this chapter on the
long list of well-meaning, mostly white and male comparative musicologists/ethnomusicologists
whose work has made worthwhile contributions to our understanding cross-cultural musical diversity,
but also has substantial flaws, particularly regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion. (Ironically, the
much-criticized Natural History of Song project is the only project reviewed here with a non-white
researcher [Manvir Singh] in a leadership role.) The first comparative musicologists we met, such as
Ellis, Stumpf, and Hornbostel also saw themselves as championing the music of indigenous peoples
that had been ignored too long. While the language they used at the time (e.g., “primitive” music)
certainly feels racist and condescending now, relative to their contemporaries in historical musicology,
their efforts could be seen as a (very imperfect!) early attempt at anti-racism. Similar noble intentions
were expressed even more forcefully by Lomax, whose goal in creating Cantometrics was clearly
articulated as part of a political “appeal for cultural equity” (Lomax, 1977) designed to provide a
scientific basis by which to recognize the value of non-Western and folk musicians and cultures.
Indeed, Lomax’s politics were so radical he spent much of his life on an FBI watch-list of suspected
communists (Szwed, 2010). This emphatically does NOT mean that Lomax, myself, or other
comparative musicologists did not contribute to perpetuating racist systems. But I suggest that in most
cases they (we) were at least trying to do what they thought was right, and generally were not any
more racist than our ethnomusicologist colleagues who were critical of comparative musicology.

Nevertheless, we can and must do better. Many are trying. For example, the latest paper from the
Natural History of Song team (Hilton & Moser et al., 2022) had 7 out of 43 coauthors affiliated with
institutions in non-Western countries – a substantial increase from 0 out of 19 in their 2019 Science
paper. The study mentioned earlier led by Nori Jacoby included 17 out of 34 coauthors affiliated with
institutions in non-Western countries (Jacoby et al., 2021). Jacoby, Lisa Margulis and I also invited
28
15 ethnomusicologists, music psychologists, and other cross-cultural researchers from around the
world to a symposium where we came up with a list of 14 recommendations for best practices in
building sustainable global collaborations (Savage, Jacoby, Margulis, et al., 2022). The first, and most
important, was to “identify and recruit stakeholders representing diverse communities at all levels of
organization and all stages of a project” (see Box 2.1 for the full list of recommendations). We are
now consciously trying to follow these recommendations in a new project led by my PhD student
Yuto Ozaki comparing song and speech in over 50 diverse languages throughout the world, in which
each language is recorded and analyzed by a researcher who speaks it as their 1st or heritage language
(Ozaki et al., 2022).

Box 2.1. List of 14 key take-home recommendations for building sustainable global
collaborations (Savage, Jacoby, Margulis, et al., In Press). [CC BY at
https://psyarxiv.com/cb4ys]

Of course, this is all easier said than done. Colleagues have told me (off the record) that
recommendations like ours or Urassa et al.’s to collaborate with local coauthors are unrealistic and
naïve to the realities of fieldwork in indigenous communities. Others have criticized our
recommendations as not being radical enough: for example, Sarah Sauvé, Elizabeth Phillips, Wyatt
Schiefelbein, Shantala Hegde, Psyche Loui, Sylvia Moore, and my own graduate student (and
coauthor of the criticized article) Hideo Daikoku criticize our approach as "diversity through
assimilation" (Sauvé et al., 2021). I don’t have a good solution that will please everyone, and I doubt
29
anyone will ever have such an answer. But it is a start, and I think is better than just sticking to
business as usual. In the following chapters I will show some examples for productive ways to do
better in future comparative musicological research.

2.9 Conclusion: Colonialism, technology, and globalization

Looking back on the historical rise and fall and rise of comparative musicology, we can see three
major interlinked concepts interacting to shape the broad research trajectory: colonialism, technology,
and globalization. The first comparative musicological studies were stimulated in large part by
Europeans becoming exposed to unfamiliar musical styles of the Americas and Asia as their colonial
empires expanded into these regions. For example, data from early comparative musicological works
by Ellis, Stumpf, etc. from what is now India, Indonesia, Thailand, Canada, etc. became available
because of the colonial expansions of British, Dutch, French, and other empires into these regions.
We have seen how the invention of audio recording technology in the late 19 th century and the
computer in the mid-20th century profoundly affected our ability to analyze and compare musical
works across cultures in fine detail and at large scale. At the same time, we still see in the 21st century
that automated analysis struggles even to analyze Western polyphonic music, let alone non-Western
musical styles. Chapter 3 will work through detailed examples of the pros and cons of different
technologies for comparing different kinds of music.

Globalization has had perhaps the most complex effects. On one hand, most societies throughout the
world have become economically and culturally interconnected, and so there are few if any alive who
have not had at least some exposure to the kinds of Western-influenced music found in global popular
and classical music (Huron, 2008). This makes it difficult to control for the influence of such musical
exposure in comparative studies. On the other hand, one potential benefit of globalization is that there
is now a new generation of researchers who have grown up in diverse cultures and are enthusiastic
about providing a comparative perspective as insiders in their own musical traditions and their place
in the world. Such researchers – often “bimusical” as well as bilingual – might provide the missing
“emic” (subjective, insider) perspective that generations of Western ethnomusicologists and
comparative musicologists have attempted with limited success to give voice to. Synthesizing
multiple such emic perspectives with one another and with “etic” (objective, outsider) will be a
challenge, yet it is one that some researchers have already made progress in tackling. Jacoby et al.’s
(preprint) global study of rhythmic priors is an excellent example of how new technology (iterated
rhythm transmission experiment hardware/software; statistical analysis) interacts with
colonialism/globalization as researchers from around the world recruit participants from their local
regions, including some who are bimusical in traditional local and Western traditions and some who
have only grown up being exposed to the dominant global music cultures. Jacoby et al.’s nuanced
cross-cultural and intracultural analysis shows how it is possible to simultaneously explore musical
diversity within- and between-cultures in ways that provide quantitative evidence for both statistically
universal and culturally specific aspects of music. I am optimistic that similar global collaborations
and the general trend of increased participation of younger researchers from non-Western
backgrounds holds major promise for the future of comparative musicology.

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