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Cross-Cultural Work in Music Cognition 185 CROSS-CULTURAL WORK IN MUSIC COGNITION: CHALLENGES, INSIGHTS, AND RECOMMENDATIONS NORI JACOBY GAVIN STEINGO Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt Princeton University am Main, Germany CATHERINE J. STEVENS ELIZABETH HELLMUTH MARGULIS Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia Princeton University LAUREL TRAINOR MARTIN CLAYTON McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom SANDRA TREHUB ERIN HANNON University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada University of Nevada, Las Vegas MICHAEL VEAL HENKJAN HONING Yale University University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands MELANIE WALD-FUHRMANN JOHN IVERSEN Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt University of California, San Diego am Main, Germany TOBIAS ROBERT KLEIN MANY FOUNDATIONAL QUESTIONS IN THE Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has SAMUEL A. MEHR been conducted with Western participants and Western Harvard University music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary LARA PEARSON backgrounds, as well as strategies for overcoming differ- Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt ences in assumptions, methods, and terminology. This am Main, Germany position paper surveys the current state of the field and offers a number of concrete recommendations focused ISABELLE PERETZ on issues involving ethics, empirical methods, and defi- University of Montreal, Montreal, Canada nitions of ‘‘music’’ and ‘‘culture.’’ MARC PERLMAN Received: June 10, 2019, accepted October 15, 2019. Brown University Key words: cross-cultural, music, psychology, ethno- musicology, methods RAINER POLAK Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany OST RESEARCH IN PSYCHOLOGY AND ANDREA RAVIGNANI neuroscience has been conducted on WEIRD Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium M participants—that is, individuals who hail from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and PATRICK E. SAVAGE Democratic societies (for an extensive review of this Keio University, Fujisawa, Japan issue in psychology see Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, Music Perception, VOLUME 37, ISSUE 3, PP. 185–195, ISSN 0730-7829, ELECTRONIC ISSN 1533-8312. © 2020 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PLEASE DIRECT ALL REQUESTS FOR PERMISSION TO PHOTOCOPY OR REPRODUCE ARTICLE CONTENT THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS ’S REPRINTS AND PERMISSIONS WEB PAGE, HTTPS://WWW.UCPRESS.EDU/JOURNALS/REPRINTS-PERMISSIONS. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/MP.2020.37.3.185 186 Nori Jacoby et al. 2010). Music psychology shares this sampling bias: issues and recommendations for each. We hope that this participants are almost always recruited from WEIRD overview will prove useful to researchers planning societies, experimental materials are usually drawn empirical cross-cultural projects and will encourage from Western music, and studies tend to investigate interdisciplinary teams that bridge the sciences and constructs such as harmonic progressions that are dis- humanities. Although the recommendations described proportionately relevant to Western music. here are mainly focused on cross-cultural research, This situation gives rise to at least two fundamental many of them are also relevant to music research more problems. First, it biases the understanding of human broadly. All research on music could benefit from broad mechanisms for music perception and production, hypotheses that incorporate diverse ideas about how because WEIRD populations do not necessarily consti- music works and by exposing the limitations of a pro- tute a representative sample along multiple critical ject’s musical and methodological choices. dimensions ranging from basic visual and spatial per- ception to social cognition (Henrich et al., 2010). Sec- CONTEXT ond, important questions regarding the biological and Researchers are integrated into disciplinary subcultures cultural origins of music, its relation to language and with different assumptions and goals. These need to be other activities, and the diversity and commonality of rendered explicit to facilitate communication across dis- human music making require the kind of comparative ciplinary divides. Some issues raised by cross-cultural cross-cultural approaches already common in other music cognition research, and the possibilities and fields such as linguistics and anthropology. Addressing obstacles facing interdisciplinary engagement between these issues will require interdisciplinary collaboration music psychology and ethnomusicology, have been dis- among psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, cussed over the last decade or so (e.g., Becker, 2009a, and (ethno)musicologists, as well as the incorporation 2009b; Clayton, Dueck, & Leante, 2013; Lawson, 2014; of methods from cross-cultural psychology into music Tolbert, 1992; Widdess, 2012), but much remains to be cognition research. resolved if we are to produce a sustained body of The goal of this paper is to consider some require- research in which both disciplines can be confident. ments as well as possible challenges and benefits occa- Our current interest in cross-cultural music cognition sioned by such collaborations. This document outlines might be said to recapitulate some aspects of compara- a list of recommendations that arose from an interdis- tive musicology of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ciplinary conversation at the Max Planck Institute for a time when the approaches that would develop into Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany over the music psychology and ethnomusicology were deeply course of several days in October 2018. The meeting entwined (see review in Clayton, 2009). Comparative from which these recommendations emerged was not musicology emerged in the late 19th century and flour- designed to generate an exhaustive checklist or set of ished in the early 20th century. Inspired by Gestalt psy- guidelines for cross-cultural research in music, but chology, it was motivated by theories about the origins rather to serve as a departure point for further thought. and structure of music and explicitly aimed to uncover For example, a major limitation of the meeting was that universal trends and features of music (Hornbostel, it was comprised predominantly of white men and 1975; Nettl, 2015; Nettl & Bohlman, 1991; Sachs, women from elite Euro-American academic institu- 1962; Savage & Brown, 2013; Stumpf, 1911/2012). Com- tions. Given that representation was one of the key parative studies by researchers such as Carl Stumpf, issues raised, we debated the wisdom of publishing our Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, Charles Myers, Curt summary document before more workshops could be Sachs, and Alan Lomax raise complex ethical questions. held with a wider range of participants. We decided, On the one hand, such research attempted to assert the however, that there was merit in sharing our thoughts value of non-Western music that had previously been and stimulating discussion of these issues, while dismissed; on the other hand, their attempts to use acknowledging the necessity of further conversations Western scientific frameworks to do so have been crit- with more representative and diverse voices. icized as perpetuating ideologies of the imperial powers This paper begins with a brief description of the dis- (Clarke, 2014; Clayton, 2007, in press; Lomax, 1968; ciplinary context of cross-cultural and comparative Nettl & Bohlman, 1991; Savage, 2018). research on music, illuminating some of the sources of With the growing influence of North American cul- disciplinary tensions. It then explores four central tural anthropology, carefully detailed ethnographies of topics—1) music and musicality; 2) culture(s); 3) ethics; specific communities increasingly replaced comparative and 4) paradigms and methods—and outlines some key approaches. The Society for Ethnomusicology was Cross-Cultural Work in Music Cognition 187 founded in 1955 as an explicit break with the tradition music cognition with auditory cognition) is predicated of comparative musicology. In broad terms, ethnomu- on culturally based agreement negotiated within and sicology emphasized participant observation, and raised between groups, which changes over time. The term cultural relativism to the level of axiom (Nettl, 2015). encompasses a variety of concepts surrounding human The formation of the discipline in explicitly relativistic activities that may include structured sound (especially terms occurred in tandem with a wave of independence in terms of pitch height, pitch duration, timbre, and and anti-colonial movements across the globe. Begin- form), communicative meaning, rituals, and constitu- ning in the 1970s and continuing through the early tive body movements (singing, playing an instrument, 1990s, many disciplines in the social sciences and gesturing, clapping, dancing). humanities underwent a thorough self-critique by inves- Cross-culturally, conceptions of music vary greatly. tigating their epistemological and institutional origins in What is heard as music by an outside listener may not colonialism. This resulted in a tendency to emphasize function as such within the society that produces the ‘‘partial’’ (rather than ‘‘universal’’) knowledge, the par- sound; even different individuals within a society may ticular and the local (e.g.,