Considering its domain and range, folklore is a discipline suitable for interdisciplinary studies by contributing to many scientific disciplines, especially social sciences and arts, or benefiting from them. In this context, we notice that folklorists benefit from the scientific disciplines such as anthropology, linguistics, music, history, sociology and psychology at both theoretical and practical levels, and occasionally contribute to these disciplines. It is an unquestionable fact that among mentioned disciplines music, in particular, has a very wide and important place in folklore studies. Music has always appeared with its determinative and distinctive functions both in the process that covers the creation, transfer and sustainability of folklore outputs, and in the processes of defining, collecting, classifying, researching and analyzing them. In this context, even though the importance and function of music in folklore studies have been mentioned in many academic publications, musical features have been included in a specific and limited scope in a significant majority of these publications. Contrary to this situation, detailed musical analyses within the context of folklore have appeared in some studies; however, the number of these studies is limited. Considering current situation, this paper, written in the scope of Turkish folklore, has been prepared based on the view and thesis that it is important and necessary for researcher to incline to an interdisciplinary study, in its researches on musical folklore outputs, by obtaining musical knowledge or benefiting from it. In this context, the paper starts from the importance of music in the solution of the genre, form and maqam in the ashik poetry tradition. Then, it tries to explain with examples the determinative and distinctive features of music in the process of creation and transfer within the master-apprentice learning pattern in the context of ashik and Turkish epic narrative traditions; in the development and performance of religious or non-religious rituals and ritual-centred folklore outputs; the performance of folk dances; the process of creation and transfer of verse genres and forms of anonymous folk literature. The paper evaluates in which functions can be used musical items, such as rhythm (method), tune pattern (maqam/style), tempo, passages, strong pitch, increasing melodic interval size etc., within the processes of defining, collecting, researching, classification and analyzing folklore outputs that have musical features. After these evaluations, the paper discusses the necessity and importance of including musical features in studies in the period from finding and collecting to the analyzing folklore outputs within the scope of the text-centred and context-centred folklore theories. In this context, the paper puts forward the contributions which will occur as a result of the functional use of music in folklore studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]