Chapter 30 Further Reading: Music Across Cultures — Universal Physics, Diverse Structures

Foundational Research Articles

Mehr, S. A., Singh, M., Knox, D., Ketter, D. M., Pickens-Jones, D., Atwood, S., ... & Glowacki, L. (2019). Universality and diversity in human song. Science, 366(6468), eaax0868. The central study of this chapter. Full access to supplementary materials is available through the journal. Reading the methods section is highly recommended for understanding the sampling strategy, selection criteria, and listener experiment design. The supplementary figures provide detailed breakdowns by culture and by acoustic feature.

Sethares, W. A. (1993). Local consonance and the relationship between timbre and scale. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 94(3), 1218–1228. The groundbreaking paper demonstrating computationally that each spectral structure implies an optimal scale — the foundational acoustic account of why gamelan's scale and spectrum are self-consistent. Technical but essential for understanding the physics of the gamelan case.

Nettl, B. (1983). The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts. University of Illinois Press. The classic statement of ethnomusicological methodology and skepticism about universals. Chapter 3 ("Is Music Universal?") is directly relevant to this chapter's framing and is the source of the Nettl quotation in the chapter opening. Essential background for understanding the disciplinary context.

Savage, P. E., Brown, S., Sakai, E., & Currie, T. E. (2015). Statistical universals reveal the structures and functions of human music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(29), 8987–8992. A complementary study to Mehr et al., using a different sample and methodology. Finds similar evidence for statistical universals in music, particularly around the use of pitch and rhythm together and the prevalence of scales with 5–7 pitches. Important for triangulating the Mehr et al. results.

Koelsch, S. (2012). Brain and Music. Wiley-Blackwell. A comprehensive neuroscientific account of music processing. Chapters 4–6 (on music syntax and the music-language relationship) are directly relevant to Section 30.11. Technical but accessible to advanced undergraduates.

Honing, H., ten Cate, C., Peretz, I., & Trehub, S. E. (2015). Without it no music: Cognition, biology and evolution of musicality. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 370(1664), 20140088. An introduction to a landmark themed issue of Philosophical Transactions B devoted to the evolution and biology of music. The full issue (open access) is one of the best single resources on the evolutionary biology of music.

Dunbar, R. I. M. (2012). On the evolutionary function of song and dance. In N. Bannan (Ed.), Music, Language and Human Evolution. Oxford University Press. Dunbar's clearest statement of the grooming replacement hypothesis applied to music. Essential reading for evaluating this evolutionary account.

Books and Extended Works

Nettl, B. (2005). The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts (2nd ed.). University of Illinois Press. The expanded edition of the discipline's defining methodological text. The chapter on universals is updated to engage with more recent cross-cultural work, including some of the quantitative studies that emerged after the first edition.

Reck, D. (1977). Music of the Whole Earth. Charles Scribner's Sons. A comprehensive and beautifully illustrated survey of world music traditions, written for a general educated audience. Strong on the physics and organology of diverse instruments. Accessible as a companion to more technical readings.

Tenzer, M., & Roeder, J. (Eds.). (2011). Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music. Oxford University Press. A collection of analytical essays applying music-theoretical tools to non-Western repertoires. Particularly strong on gamelan (multiple chapters), Indian classical music, and African music. More technical than Reck; appropriate for students with music theory background.

Sethares, W. A. (2005). Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale (2nd ed.). Springer. The book-length development of Sethares's acoustic argument about the relationship between timbre and scale. Chapter 4 applies the argument to gamelan; Chapter 5 extends it to other non-Western traditions; later chapters explore compositional applications. Essential for anyone who wants to go deeper into the physics of the gamelan case.

Blacking, J. (1973). How Musical Is Man? University of Washington Press. A classic short work by one of ethnomusicology's most humane scholars. Blacking argues from field research among the Venda of South Africa that musical capacity is a fundamental human characteristic — a perspective that anticipates the later evolutionary biology discussions and connects them to rich ethnographic detail.

Levitin, D. J. (2008). The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. Dutton. Levitin's follow-up to This Is Your Brain on Music, focused specifically on the evolutionary function of music. He proposes six universal song types (friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love) and argues for their evolutionary basis. An engaging read; the evolutionary claims are more speculative than rigorous.

Tomlinson, G. (2015). A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity. Zone Books. A more scholarly and philosophically ambitious account of music's evolutionary origins, extending the timeframe deep into hominin prehistory and engaging with archaeology, paleoanthropology, and philosophy of mind. Challenging but rewarding.

Audio and Listening Resources

Smithsonian Folkways (folkways.si.edu): The Smithsonian Institution's archive of world music recordings, many of them recorded ethnographically and extensively annotated. Particularly valuable collections include the Music of the World's Peoples series, the Anthology of Music of Black Africa, and numerous recordings of gamelan, raga, and other traditions discussed in this chapter. Many recordings are freely streamable.

EVIA Digital Archive Project (eviada.org): An archive of audio and video ethnographic recordings from ethnomusicological field research, hosted by the University of Michigan and the University of Indiana. Contains materials from the field that are not commercially available.

Gamelan Digital Archive (gamelan.org): Resources on gamelan music, including recordings, descriptions of instrument construction, and discussions of tuning practices. Valuable for supplementing the gamelan case study.

The Music Lab (musiclab.science): Harvard's Music Lab runs ongoing online experiments in cross-cultural music research that members of the public can participate in. Participating in active research is an excellent way to engage with the methodology discussed in Case Study 30-2 from the inside.

Key Journals for Further Research

  • Ethnomusicology (the flagship journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology)
  • Music Perception (primary journal for empirical music psychology)
  • Frontiers in Psychology: Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (for the physics-focused readings)
  • Evolution and Human Behavior (for the evolutionary biology of music research)