Comparative musicology: Evolution, universals, and the science of the world’s music

Why do all human societies make music, but in such different ways? Scientific attempts to answer this question through cross-cultural comparison stalled during the 20th century and have only recently begun to make a resurgence. In this book, a leader in this resurgence synthesizes recent advances from musicology and related fields including psychology, linguistics, computer science, and evolutionary anthropology to outline ways to understand and compare all the world’s music. He applies comparative musicology to longstanding debates about universal and culturally-specific aspects of human music; evolutionary relationships between song, speech, and animal vocalisation; and applications to areas including music copyright, 2nd language acquisition, social bonding, and cultural heritage revitalisation. In doing so, he argues for an inclusive, multidisciplinary field that uplifts traditionally marginalised voices and combines the qualitative methods traditionally employed by musicologists and cultural anthropologists with quantitative methods from the natural sciences. The chapters are designed to be readable/teachable on their own, and the book includes a simplified tutorial (Ch. 2) and historical overview (Ch. 3) so that it can be appreciated by anyone from undergraduate students to senior professors, without requiring any specialised background knowledge (previous knowledge of music notation, ethnomusicology, statistics, biology, etc. are not required).