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MANY FOUNDATIONAL QUESTIONS IN THE psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has been conducted with Western participants and Western music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as strategies for overcoming differences in assumptions, methods, and terminology. This position paper surveys the current state of the field and offers a number of concrete recommendations focused on issues involving ethics, empirical methods, and definitions of ''music'' and ''culture.''. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary offers a review of Videira and Rosa's attempt to construct and validate an online corpus of fado transcriptions. While I support their application of music information retrieval (MIR) tools to diverse musical repertoires, I fear that a lack of clarity in their goals leads them to fall into the trap of finding "solutions in search of a problem" that is common in computational ethnomusicology. I highlight ways in which I believe they could improve future work on this project, including: 1) more interdisciplinary collaboration, 2) more clarity in their goals, and 3) the use of corpora and tools that are more suitable for comparing the symbolic data contained in their database of musical transcriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Understanding cross-cultural patterns of musical diversity requires some method of visualizing these patterns using maps. The traditional methods of cross-cultural comparison have been criticized for ignoring the rich diversity of musical styles that exists within each culture. We present a compromise solution in which we map the relative frequencies of different "cantogroups" (stylistic song-types) both within and between cultures. Applying this method to 259 traditional group songs from twelve indigenous peoples of Taiwan, we identified five major cantogroups, the frequencies of which varied across the twelve groups. From this information, we were able to create musical maps of Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of cultural evolution was fundamental to the foundation of academic musicology and the subfield of comparative musicology, but largely disappeared from discussion after World War II despite a recent resurgence of interest in cultural evolution in other fields. I draw on recent advances in the scientific understanding of cultural evolution to clarify persistent misconceptions about the roles of genes and progress in musical evolution, and review literature relevant to musical evolution ranging from macroevolution of global song-style to microevolution of tune families. I also address criticisms regarding issues of musical agency, meaning, and reductionism, and highlight potential applications including music education and copyright. While cultural evolution will never explain all aspects of music, it offers a useful theoretical framework for understanding diversity and change in the world's music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]