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• Published: 26 July 2012

Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music

• Joan Serrà 1 ,
• Álvaro Corral 2 ,
• Marián Boguñá 3 ,
• Martín Haro 4 &
• Josep Ll. Arcos 1  

Scientific Reports volume  2 , Article number:  521 ( 2012 ) Cite this article

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Popular music is a key cultural expression that has captured listeners' attention for ages. Many of the structural regularities underlying musical discourse are yet to be discovered and, accordingly, their historical evolution remains formally unknown. Here we unveil a number of patterns and metrics characterizing the generic usage of primary musical facets such as pitch, timbre and loudness in contemporary western popular music. Many of these patterns and metrics have been consistently stable for a period of more than fifty years. However, we prove important changes or trends related to the restriction of pitch transitions, the homogenization of the timbral palette and the growing loudness levels. This suggests that our perception of the new would be rooted on these changing characteristics. Hence, an old tune could perfectly sound novel and fashionable, provided that it consisted of common harmonic progressions, changed the instrumentation and increased the average loudness.

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Introduction

Isn't it always the same? This question could be easily posed while listening to the music of any mainstream radio station in a western country. Like language, music is a human universal involving perceptually discrete elements displaying organization 1 . Therefore, contemporary popular music may have a well-established set of underlying patterns and regularities 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , some of them potentially inherited from the classical tradition 5 , 6 , 7 . Yet, as an incomparable artistic product for conveying emotions 8 , music must incorporate variation over such patterns in order to play upon people's memories and expectations, making it attractive to listeners 3 , 4 , 5 . For the very same reasons, long-term variations of the underlying patterns may also occur across years 9 . Many of these aspects remain formally unknown or lack scientific evidence, specially the latter, which is very often neglected in music-related studies, from musicological analyses to technological applications. The study of patterns and long-term variations in popular music could shed new light on relevant issues concerning its organization, structure and dynamics 10 . More importantly, it addresses valuable questions for the basic understanding of music as one of the main expressions of contemporary culture: Can we identify some of the patterns behind music creation? Do musicians change them over the years? Can we spot differences between new and old music? Is there an ‘evolution’ of musical discourse?

Current technologies for music information processing 11 , 12 provide a unique opportunity to answer the above questions under objective, empirical and quantitative premises. Moreover, akin to recent advances in other cultural assets 13 , they allow for unprecedented large-scale analyses. One of the first publicly-available large-scale collections that has been analyzed by standard music processing technologies is the million song dataset 14 . Among others, the dataset includes the year annotations and audio descriptions of 464,411 distinct music recordings (from 1955 to 2010), which roughly corresponds to more than 1,200 days of continuous listening. Such recordings span a variety of popular genres, including rock, pop, hip hop, metal, or electronic. Explicit descriptions available in the dataset 15 cover three primary and complementary musical facets 2 : loudness, pitch and timbre. Loudness basically correlates with our perception of sound amplitude or volume (notice that we refer to the intrinsic loudness of a recording, not the loudness a listener could manipulate). Pitch roughly corresponds to the harmonic content of the piece, including its chords, melody and tonal arrangements. Timbre accounts for the sound color, texture, or tone quality and can be essentially associated with instrument types, recording techniques and some expressive performance resources. These three music descriptions can be obtained at the temporal resolution of the beat, which is perhaps the most relevant temporal unit in music, specially in western popular music 2 , 4 .

Here we study the music evolution under the aforementioned premises and large-scale resources. By exploiting tools and concepts from statistical physics and complex networks 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , we unveil a number of statistical patterns and metrics characterizing the general usage of pitch, timbre and loudness in contemporary western popular music. Many of these patterns and metrics remain consistently stable for a period of more than 50 years, which points towards a great degree of conventionalism in the creation and production of this type of music. Yet, we find three important trends in the evolution of musical discourse: the restriction of pitch sequences (with metrics showing less variety in pitch progressions), the homogenization of the timbral palette (with frequent timbres becoming more frequent) and growing average loudness levels (threatening a dynamic richness that has been conserved until today). This suggests that our perception of the new would be essentially rooted on identifying simpler pitch sequences, fashionable timbral mixtures and louder volumes. Hence, an old tune with slightly simpler chord progressions, new instrument sonorities that were in agreement with current tendencies and recorded with modern techniques that allowed for increased loudness levels could be easily perceived as novel, fashionable and groundbreaking.

To identify structural patterns of musical discourse we first need to build a ‘vocabulary’ of musical elements ( Fig. 1 ). To do so, we encode the dataset descriptions by a discretization of their values, yielding what we call music codewords 20 (see Supplementary Information, SI ). In the case of pitch, the descriptions of each song are additionally transposed to an equivalent main tonality, such that all of them are automatically considered within the same tonal context or key. Next, to quantify long-term variations of a vocabulary, we need to obtain samples of it at different periods of time. For that we perform a Monte Carlo sampling in a moving window fashion. In particular, for each year, we sample one million beat-consecutive codewords, considering entire tracks and using a window length of 5 years (the window is centered at the corresponding year such that, for instance, for 1994 we sample one million consecutive beats by choosing full tracks whose year annotation is between 1992 and 1996, both included). This procedure, which is repeated 10 times, guarantees a representative sample with a smooth evolution over the years.

Method schematic summary with pitch data.

The dataset contains the beat-based music descriptions of the audio rendition of a musical piece or score (G, Em and D7 on the top of the staff denote chords). For pitch, these descriptions reflect the harmonic content of the piece 15 and encapsulate all sounding notes of a given time interval into a compact representation 11 , 12 , independently of their articulation (they consist of the 12 pitch class relative energies, where a pitch class is the set of all pitches that are a whole number of octaves apart, e.g. notes C1, C2 and C3 all collapse to pitch class C). All descriptions are encoded into music codewords, using a binary discretization in the case of pitch. Codewords are then used to perform frequency counts and as nodes of a complex network whose links reflect transitions between subsequent codewords.

We first count the frequency of usage of pitch codewords (i.e. the number of times each codeword type appears in a sample). We observe that most used pitch codewords generally correspond to well-known harmonic items 21 , while unused codewords correspond to strange/dissonant pitch combinations ( Fig. 2a ). Sorting the frequency counts in decreasing order provides a very clear pattern behind the data: a power law 17 of the form z ∝ r −α , where z corresponds to the frequency count of a codeword, r denotes its rank (i.e. r = 1 for the most used codeword and so forth) and α is the power law exponent. Specifically, we find that the distribution of codeword frequencies for a given year nicely fits to P ( z ) ∝ ( c + z ) −β for z > z min , where we take z as the random variable 22 , β = 1 + 1/α as the exponent and c as a constant ( Fig. 2b ). A power law indicates that a few codewords are very frequent while the majority are highly infrequent (intuitively, the latter provide the small musical nuances necessary to make a discourse attractive to listeners 3 , 4 , 5 ). Nonetheless, it also states that there is no characteristic frequency nor rank separating most used codewords from largely unused ones (except for the largest rank values due to the finiteness of the vocabulary). Another non-trivial consequence of power-law behavior is that when α ≤ 2, extreme events (i.e. very rare codewords) will certainly show up in a continuous discourse providing the listening time is sufficient and the pre-arranged dictionary of musical elements is big enough.

Pitch distributions and networks.

Importantly, we find this power-law behavior to be invariant across years, with practically the same fit parameters. In particular, the exponent β remains close to an average of 2.18 ± 0.06 (corresponding to α around 0.85), which is similar to Zipf's law in linguistic text corpora 23 and contrasts with the exponents found in previous small-scale, symbolic-based music studies 24 , 25 . The slope of the least squares linear regression of β as a function of the year is negligible within statistical significance ( p > 0.05, t-test). This makes a high stability of the distribution of pitch codeword frequencies across more than 50 years of music evident. However, it could well be that, even though the distribution is the same for all years, codeword rankings were changing (e.g. a certain codeword was used frequently in 1963 but became mostly unused by 2005). To assess this possibility we compute the Spearman's rank correlation coefficients 26 for all possible year pairs and find that they are all extremely high, with an average of 0.97 ± 0.02 and a minimum above 0.91. These high correlations indicate that codeword rankings practically do not vary with years.

Codeword frequency distributions provide a generic picture of vocabulary usage. However, they do not account for discourse syntax, as well as a simple selection of words does not necessarily constitute an intelligible sentence. One way to account for syntax is to look at local interactions or transitions between codewords, which define explicit relations that capture most of the underlying regularities of the discourse and that can be directly mapped into a network or graph 18 , 19 . Hence, analogously to language-based analyses 27 , 28 , 29 , we consider the transition networks formed by codeword successions, where each node represents a codeword and each link represents a transition (see SI ). The topology of these networks and common metrics extracted from them can provide us with valuable clues about the evolution of musical discourse.

All the transition networks we obtain are sparse, meaning that the number of links connecting codewords is of the same order of magnitude as the number of codewords. Thus, in general, only a limited number of transitions between codewords is possible. Such constraints would allow for music recognition and enjoyment, since these capacities are grounded in our ability for guessing/learning transitions 3 , 4 , 8 and a non-sparse network would increase the number of possibilities in a way that guessing/learning would become unfeasible. Thinking in terms of originality and creativity, a sparse network means that there are still many ‘composition paths’ to be discovered. However, some of these paths could run into the aforementioned guessing/learning tradeoff 9 . Overall, network sparseness provides a quantitative account of music's delicate balance between predictability and surprise.

In sparse networks, the most fundamental characteristic of a codeword is its degree k , which measures the number of links to other codewords. With pitch networks, this quantity is distributed according to a power law P ( k ) ∝ k −γ for k > k min , with the same fit parameters for all considered years. The exponent γ, which has an average of 2.20±0.06, is similar to many other real complex networks 18 and the median of the degree k is always 4. Nevertheless, we observe important trends in the other considered network metrics, namely the average shortest path length l , the clustering coefficient C and the assortativity with respect to random Γ. Specifically, l slightly increases from 2.9 to 3.2, values comparable to the ones obtained when randomizing the network links. The values of C show a considerable decrease from 0.65 to 0.45 and are much higher than those obtained for the randomized network. Thus, the small-worldness 30 of the networks decreases with years ( Fig. 2c ). This trend implies that the reachability of a pitch codeword becomes more difficult. The number of hops or steps to jump from one codeword to the other (as reflected by l ) tends to increase and, at the same time, the local connectivity of the network (as reflected by C ) tends to decrease. Additionally, Γ is always below 1, which indicates that the networks are always less assortative than random (i.e. well-connected nodes are less likely to be connected among them), a tendency that grows with time if we consider the biggest hubs of the network ( SI ). The latter suggests that there are less direct transitions between ‘referential’ or common codewords. Overall, a joint reduction of the small-worldness and the network assortativity shows a progressive restriction of pitch transitions, with less transition options and more defined paths between codewords.

As opposed to pitch, timbre provides a different picture. Even though the distribution of timbre codeword frequencies is also well-fitted by a power law ( Fig. 3a ), the parameters of this distribution vary across years. In particular, since 1965, β constantly decreases to values approaching 4 ( Fig. 3b ). Although such large values of β would imply that other fits could also be acceptable, the power law provides a simple parameterization to compare the changes over the years (and is not rejected in a likelihood ratio test in front of other alternatives). Smaller values of β indicate less timbral variety: frequent codewords become more frequent and infrequent ones become even less frequent. This evidences a growing homogenization of the global timbral palette. It also points towards a progressive tendency to follow more fashionable, mainstream sonorities. Interestingly, rank correlation coefficients are generally below 0.7, with an average of 0.57 ± 0.15 ( Fig. 3c ). These rather low rank correlations would act as an attenuator of the sensation that contemporary popular music is becoming more homogeneous, timbrically speaking. The fact that frequent timbres of a certain time period become infrequent after some years could mask global homogeneity trends to listeners.

Timbre distributions.

(a) Examples of the density values and fits taking z as the random variable. (b) Fitted exponents β. (c) Spearman's rank correlation coefficients for all possible year pairs.

Compared to timbre codeword frequencies, metrics obtained from timbre transition networks show no substantial variation. Again, similar median degrees (all equal to 8) and degree distributions were observed for all considered years. However, we were not able to achieve a proper fit for the latter ( SI ). Values of Γ are larger than 1 and increasing since 1965. Thus, in contrast to pitch, timbre networks are more assortative than random. The values of l fluctuate around 4.8 and C is always below 0.01. Noticeably, both are close to the values obtained with randomly wired networks. This close to random topology quantitatively demonstrates that, as opposed to language, timbral contrasts (or transitions) are rarely the basis for a musical discourse 1 . This does not regard timbre as a meaningless facet. Global timbre properties, like the aforementioned power law and rankings, are clearly important for music categorization tasks 2 , 11 (one example is genre classification 31 ). Notice however that the evolving characteristics of musical discourse have important implications for artificial or human systems dealing with such tasks. For instance, the homogenization of the timbral palette and general timbral restrictions clearly challenge tasks exploiting this facet. A further example is found with the aforementioned restriction of pitch codeword connectivity, which could hinder song recognition systems (artificial song recognition systems are rooted on pitch codeword-like sequences, cf. 32 ).

Loudness distributions are generally well-fitted by a reversed log-normal function ( Fig. 4a ). Plotting them provides a visual account of the so-called loudness race (or loudness war), a terminology that is used to describe the apparent competition to release recordings with increasing loudness 33 , 34 , perhaps with the aim of catching potential customers' attention in a music broadcast (from our point of view, loudness changes are not only the result of technological developments but, in part, also the result of conscious decisions made by musicians and producers in the musical creation process, cf. 33 ). The empiric median of the loudness values x grows from −22 dB FS to −13 dB FS ( Fig. 4b ), with a least squares linear regression yielding a slope of 0.13 dB/year ( p < 0.01, t-test). In contrast, the absolute difference between the first and third quartiles of x remains constant around 9.5 dB ( Fig. 4c ), with a regression slope that is not statistically significant ( p > 0.05, t-test). This shows that, although music recordings become louder, their absolute dynamic variability has been conserved, understanding dynamic variability as the range between higher and lower loudness passages of a recording 34 . However and perhaps most importantly, one should notice that digital media cannot output signals over 0 dB FS 35 , which severely restricts the possibilities for maintaining the dynamic variability if the median continues to grow.

Loudness distributions.

(a) Examples of the density values and fits of the loudness variable x . (b) Empiric distribution medians. (c) Dynamic variability, expressed as absolute loudness differences between the first and third quartiles of x , | Q 1 − Q 3 |.

Finally we look at loudness transition networks, which show comparable degree distributions, a median degree between 13 and 14, values of l between 8 and 10 and a Γ fluctuating around 1.08. Noticeably, l is appreciably beyond the values obtained by randomly wired networks. The values of C have an average of 0.59 ± 0.02, also much above the values obtained by the random networks. These two observations suggest that the network has a one-dimensional character, inferring that no extreme loudness transitions occur (one rarely finds loudness transitions to drive a musical discourse). The very stable metrics obtained for loudness networks imply that, despite the race towards louder music, the topology of loudness transitions is maintained.

Beyond the specific outcomes discussed above, we now focus on the evolution of musical discourse. Much of the gathered evidence points towards an important degree of conventionalism, in the sense of blockage or no-evolution, in the creation and production of contemporary western popular music. Thus, from a global perspective, popular music would have no clear trends and show no considerable changes in more than fifty years. Pitch codeword frequencies are found to be always under the same underlying pattern: a power law with the same exponent and fitting parameters. Moreover, frequency-based rankings of pitch codewords are practically identical and several of the network metrics for pitch, timbre and loudness remain immutable. Frequency distributions for timbre and loudness also fall under a universal pattern: a power law and a reversed log-normal distribution, respectively. However, these distributions' parameters do substantially change with years. In addition, some metrics for pitch networks clearly show a progression. Thus, beyond the global perspective, we observe a number of trends in the evolution of contemporary popular music. These point towards less variety in pitch transitions, towards a consistent homogenization of the timbral palette and towards louder and, in the end, potentially poorer volume dynamics.

Each of us has a perception of what is new and what is not in popular music. According to our findings, this perception should be largely rooted on the simplicity of pitch sequences, the usage of relatively novel timbral mixtures that are in agreement with the current tendencies and the exploitation of modern recording techniques that allow for louder volumes. This brings us to conjecture that an old popular music piece would be perceived as novel by essentially following these guidelines. In fact, it is informally known that a ‘safe’ way for contemporizing popular music tracks is to record a new version of an existing piece with current means, but without altering the main ‘semantics’ of the discourse.

Some of the conclusions reported here have historically remained as conjectures, based on restricted resources, or rather framed under subjective, qualitative and non-systematic premises. With the present work, we gain empirical evidence through a formal, quantitative and systematic analysis of a large-scale music collection. We encourage the development of further historical databases to be able to quantify the major transitions in the history of music and to start looking at more subtle evolving characteristics of particular genres or artists, without forgetting the whole wealth of cultures and music styles present in the world.

Detailed method descriptions are provided in the SI .

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by Catalan Government grants 2009-SGR-164 (A.C.), 2009-SGR-1434 (J.S. and J.Ll.A.), 2009-SGR-838 (M.B.) and ICREA Academia Prize 2010 (M.B.), European Comission grant FP7-ICT-2011.1.5-287711 (M.H.), Spanish Government grants FIS2009-09508 (A.C.), FIS2010-21781-C02-02 (M.B.) and TIN2009-13692-C03-01 (J.Ll.A.) and Spanish National Research Council grant JAEDOC069/2010 (J.S.). The authors would like to thank the million song dataset team for making this massive source of data publicly available.

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Serrà, J., Corral, Á., Boguñá, M. et al. Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music. Sci Rep 2 , 521 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep00521

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Popular Music Resources

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Quick Introduction

MSPAL has a variety of resources to help you with your popular music research project, including databases, articles, books, CDs, and some unique primary sources. 

Below, you will find a brief description of some of the tools that may be most helpful to you. 

Online Resources

• Music Index Music Index is probably the best all-around source for finding journal and magazine articles on popular music. It covers both scholarly sources (e.g. the journal Popular Music) as well as popular glossy magazines (e.g. Rolling Stone). There are two caveats. Caveat #1 is that Music Index is not a fully full-text database. When searching Music Index, look for links to 'full-text" for the articles you want to read. If you do not see the full-text button, click the red Find It button to see if the UMD Libraries have it in another full-text repository or in paper--if we do not have the article in any form, you will be see with a link to request it through interlibrary loan. Caveat #2 is that the Music Index database only covers articles written in 1976 or more recently, which misses a lot of primary sources for the study of popular music history. If you are looking for articles written before 1976, try the print version of Music Index (going back to 1949), the RILM database (back to 1967), or a bibliography on popular music. For REALLY old stuff, like 19th century and early 20th century music, try RIPM.

• Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive is a series of digital collections focused on 20th and 21st century genres such as Rock, Folk, and Hip-Hop & Rap. Researchers will find all material represented in the original publications, preserved in its original context, fully searchable and in high-resolution full color. The dates of coverage are1960-2016. There isn't a ton of material here but just about everything is interesting and there is some great primary source material.
• JSTOR JSTOR is a very large online repository of full-text scholarly journals. Its advantage for the study of popular music is that just about everything in JSTOR is high quality, all the articles you find will be immediately downloadable as PDFs, and the coverage is vast. One major downside is that due to licensing agreements, JSTOR doesn't typically have content from the most recent five years or so. For the most recent articles, try Music Index, RILM, or Google Scholar. Since JSTOR is such a large repository, one downside is you can easily get irrelevant search results (e.g., Lizzo--the Physical Chemist--will show up if you just search for "Lizzo"). You can get around this issue by adding more words to your search (Lizzo and (rap or music or flute)). Another good option is to click Browse and then drill down to a specific subject area (e.g. Arts>Music). Tip: popular music is quite interdisciplinary--you will find lots of good stuff not just in the Music category, but in many others as well. Particularly fruitful subjects to browse in JSTOR would be: History, Language & Literature, Performing Arts of course, and all the areas listed under Area Studies.
• RILM Music RILM is similar to Music Index in that it is mainly an index and not fully full-text. It uses the same interface as well. (Follow the advice under Music Index above for locating articles that are not available as full-text within RILM. RILM differs from Music Index in its coverage--RILM skews noticeably more scholarly and it doesn't cover all the popular magazines that Music Index does. RILM is also more international in scope. Finally, the online version of RILM goes back further (it has coverage back to 1967).

There are many discographies and guides to research in the reference section of MSPAL. Here are a few that may be especially useful:

Special Collections in Popular Music

You can find collections of rare or unique materials at Special Collections in the Performing Arts (SCPA) , located inside MSPAL. A few collections might be especially interesting to popular music researchers:

• The Keesing Collection on Popular Music and Culture "The Keesing Collection on Popular Music and Culture consists of books, serials, recordings, sheet music, clippings, memorabilia, and teaching and research materials related to twentieth-century American popular music, and to rock and roll music in particular. The materials were collected by Hugo Keesing, a popular culture scholar and former professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, and by Dr. Keesing's brother, Wouter Keesing. The bulk of the collection covers the period from the 1950s to the 1990s. Serials in the collection include Rolling Stone, Pulse, Discoveries, Goldmine, and many other national and regional music serials. Research and teaching materials include Dr. Keesing's University of Maryland syllabi and class notes, writings, auction lists, catalogues, and price guides. In addition to the books housed with the archival collection, there are an additional 3,000 books that are can be found through the University of Maryland catalog. The collection is broad in its coverage of twentieth-century popular music; however, the collection originally contained a significant number of books, magazines, clippings, and memorabilia related to Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Roy Orbison, and Fats Domino, respectively. These materials have been organized into four separate collections; each collection has its own finding aid. Please note: While the majority of this collection has been processed, select series may not yet have complete inventories. Please contact the curator for more information."
• D.C. Punk and Indie Fanzine Collection "The Washington, D.C. Punk and Indie Fanzine Collection (DCPIFC) seeks to document the variety of publications that were created by fans of and participants in the punk and indie music scenes that have thrived in the Washington, D.C.-area since the late 1970s. The DCPIFC contains fanzines - publications produced by enthusiasts, generally in small runs - created by members of the D.C. punk and indie music communities, as well as fanzines from outside of D.C. that include coverage of D.C. punk and indie music. The collection includes primarily paper fanzines, but it also includes born digital fanzines and digitized files of some paper fanzine materials."
• Last Updated: Nov 29, 2023 1:33 PM
• URL: https://lib.guides.umd.edu/popmusic

Popular Music Criticism

• Journals and articles
• Reference and books
• Citing your sources

Key journals

• Billboard (in ProQuest Research Library)
• Journal of Popular Music Studies
• NME. New Musical Express (in LexisNexis Academic; selected full-text only)
• Popular Music
• Popular Music and Society
• Popular Music History

Online databases

General/Multidisciplinary

Specialized

to find specific document types (for example, an interview or a music review) select the appropriate document type from the menu in the search form, if applicable (see illustration below), or type it in the search box as one of the search terms, for example: Beyonce and interview "the chainsmokers" and "music review"

See also tips for searching the catalog .

Illustration: fragment of the Academic Search Complete search form with the "Document type" limit

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• Last Updated: Mar 11, 2024 12:02 PM
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25 Most Popular Music Research Paper Topics for Writing

Research papers aren't just for history class or the social sciences. Research papers can be assigned in any course, and that includes music class. The world's musical traditions are fertile ground for research, but because we have been conditioned from childhood to think of music as entertainment rather than a subject for academic research, it is often difficult to come up with interesting and effective topics for a music research paper. Fortunately, music research papers are often more fun to write than other types of research paper because they have such a wide range of interesting topics to explore. 

Choose from these stellar popular music research paper topics

Are you stuck looking for a music research topic? Well, you're in luck. We have twenty-five music research paper topics that will spark your creativity and get you started with your next paper. You can pick up one from this list, you can combine several of them, or maybe you will get inspired by this list and come with several topics on your own. In any case, make sure that the popular music topic for your research paper is interesting to you personally, and doesn't just sound potentially easy to write about. 

1. How is music marketed by demographic? Explore the different ways music companies target various demographic groups such as age and gender. 2. How does the categorization of music affect consumer purchasing decisions? Examine how the emphasis on genre either enhances sales or limits consumer interest. 3. Does the album have a future in the streaming era? Consider whether the album can survive in an era when singles are streamed in customized playlists. 4. How has music changed over the past half century? Explore some of the major themes and developments that have shaped popular music since the dawn of the rock-n-roll era. 5. Research the most influential musicians of a specific era. By comparing and contrasting the careers of key figures from a particular era, you can pain a picture of a moment in time. 6. What makes music "classical"? How we define "classical" music says a lot about power and privilege. Explore who decides and what criteria get used. 7. Does music have an impact on our bodies? Research medical evidence whether music can impact human health. 8. Does music have an impact on our mental health? Examine research on the use of music for mental health and therapeutic purposes. 9. Music and children: Is the Mozart effect real? How can music education impact children's academic and social development? 10. Can music education aid in memory training and memory development? Consider the current academic research and evaluate the validity of claims for music as a memory aid. 11. How does music impact dance? Music and dance are inextricably linked. Look at some of the ways that music impacts the development of dance. 12. How does a musician become successful? Examine key routes to success and what a music student can do to set themselves up for a career. 13. What other careers does a music degree prepare a student for? Research how music degrees can set the stage for careers beyond the music industry. 14. How does music impact fashion? Look at how rock-n-roll and hip hop have shaped fashion trends. 15. How is music used in advertising? Look into the reasons that artists are licensing hit singles to sell products and how that impacts consumers' views of music. 16. Classical music vs. rock-n-roll: Which has been more influential? Examine the arguments for both sides and take a position. 17. Look into the sociology of tribute bands and consider the reasons that people would dedicate their lives to imitating other musicians. 18. It is often said that "music soothes the savage beast," and farmers often use music to calm livestock. Is there truth to the notion that music has a positive impact on animals?  Explore the research and draw conclusions.

19. Music has been an important part of war throughout history, both martial music meant to rally the troops and anti-war songs. Examine the role of music in supporting and opposing war. 20. Music vs. poetry: Can song lyrics be considered a form of poetry? Why or why not? 21. How does hip-hop support African American culture and heritage? 22. Is there a problem with the close association of country music with political conservatism? 23. Select your favorite piece of music and research the influences that played a role in its creation and development. 24. Research the processes that archaeologists have used to reconstruct the sound of ancient music. 25. How do covers transform songs? Explore how covers are created now meaning.

After choosing the topic you like the most, save this list or this page to bookmarks for further references. It is good to have a library of resources at your fingertips.

Let experts rock when you are stuck

If these topics aren't enough to get you started, there is another trick to help you succeed. You can always find someone to help you with your research paper. You can contact a paper writing service online like WriteMyPaperHub and ask a professional essay writer, "Can I pay you to write my paper like an expert?" Once you do, a writer will determine what you need for your project and will begin writing a high-quality music research paper that will address your essay topic quickly, effectively, and with exceptional research and writing. You should feel free to take advantage of services like this whenever you get stuck so you can be successful with each and every music research paper.

Learning from the best and the brightest is more than beneficial. You have an opportunity to see how professional writers elaborate on a particular topic, which references they use, how they structure the whole thing. One ordered paper can be an example for your further works for months. Also, it is proven that students these days are overwhelmed with the number of assignments, and due to continuous lockdowns and limitations have less access to libraries and other necessary resources. If you feel like the pressure is too high, don't hesitate to delegate this assignment.

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• A Research Guide
• Research Paper Topics

120 Music Research Paper Topics

How to choose a topic for music research paper:.

Music Theory Research Paper Topics:

• The influence of harmonic progression on emotional response in music
• Analyzing the use of chromaticism in the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach
• The role of rhythm and meter in creating musical tension and release
• Examining the development of tonality in Western classical music
• Exploring the impact of cultural and historical context on musical form and structure
• Investigating the use of polyphony in Renaissance choral music
• Analyzing the compositional techniques of minimalist music
• The relationship between melody and harmony in popular music
• Examining the influence of jazz improvisation on contemporary music
• The role of counterpoint in the compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven
• Investigating the use of microtonality in experimental music
• Analyzing the impact of technology on music composition and production
• The influence of musical modes on the development of different musical genres
• Exploring the use of musical symbolism in film scoring
• Investigating the role of music theory in the analysis and interpretation of non-Western music

Music Industry Research Paper Topics:

• The impact of streaming services on music consumption patterns
• The role of social media in promoting and marketing music
• The effects of piracy on the music industry
• The influence of technology on music production and distribution
• The relationship between music and mental health
• The evolution of music genres and their impact on the industry
• The economics of live music events and festivals
• The role of record labels in shaping the music industry
• The impact of globalization on the music industry
• The representation and portrayal of gender in the music industry
• The effects of music streaming platforms on artist revenue
• The role of music education in fostering talent and creativity
• The influence of music videos on audience perception and engagement
• The impact of music streaming on physical album sales
• The role of music in advertising and brand marketing

Music Therapy Research Paper Topics:

• The effectiveness of music therapy in reducing anxiety in cancer patients
• The impact of music therapy on improving cognitive function in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease
• Exploring the use of music therapy in managing chronic pain
• The role of music therapy in promoting emotional well-being in children with autism spectrum disorder
• Music therapy as a complementary treatment for depression: A systematic review
• The effects of music therapy on stress reduction in pregnant women
• Examining the benefits of music therapy in improving communication skills in individuals with developmental disabilities
• The use of music therapy in enhancing motor skills rehabilitation after stroke
• Music therapy interventions for improving sleep quality in patients with insomnia
• Exploring the impact of music therapy on reducing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
• The role of music therapy in improving social interaction and engagement in individuals with schizophrenia
• Music therapy as a non-pharmacological intervention for managing symptoms of dementia
• The effects of music therapy on pain perception and opioid use in hospitalized patients
• Exploring the use of music therapy in promoting relaxation and reducing anxiety during surgical procedures
• The impact of music therapy on improving quality of life in individuals with Parkinson’s disease

Music Psychology Research Paper Topics:

• The effects of music on mood and emotions
• The role of music in enhancing cognitive abilities
• The impact of music therapy on mental health disorders
• The relationship between music and memory recall
• The influence of music on stress reduction and relaxation
• The psychological effects of different genres of music
• The role of music in promoting social bonding and cohesion
• The effects of music on creativity and problem-solving abilities
• The psychological benefits of playing a musical instrument
• The impact of music on motivation and productivity
• The psychological effects of music on physical exercise performance
• The role of music in enhancing learning and academic performance
• The influence of music on sleep quality and patterns
• The psychological effects of music on individuals with autism spectrum disorder
• The relationship between music and personality traits

Music Education Research Paper Topics:

• The impact of music education on cognitive development in children
• The effectiveness of incorporating technology in music education
• The role of music education in promoting social and emotional development
• The benefits of music education for students with special needs
• The influence of music education on academic achievement
• The importance of music education in fostering creativity and innovation
• The relationship between music education and language development
• The impact of music education on self-esteem and self-confidence
• The role of music education in promoting cultural diversity and inclusivity
• The effects of music education on students’ overall well-being and mental health
• The significance of music education in developing critical thinking skills
• The role of music education in enhancing students’ teamwork and collaboration abilities
• The impact of music education on students’ motivation and engagement in school
• The effectiveness of different teaching methods in music education
• The relationship between music education and career opportunities in the music industry

Music History Research Paper Topics:

• The influence of African music on the development of jazz in the United States
• The role of women composers in classical music during the 18th century
• The impact of the Beatles on the evolution of popular music in the 1960s
• The cultural significance of hip-hop music in urban communities
• The development of opera in Italy during the Renaissance
• The influence of folk music on the protest movements of the 1960s
• The role of music in religious rituals and ceremonies throughout history
• The evolution of electronic music and its impact on contemporary music production
• The contribution of Latin American musicians to the development of salsa music
• The influence of classical music on film scores in the 20th century
• The role of music in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States
• The development of reggae music in Jamaica and its global impact
• The influence of Mozart’s compositions on the classical music era
• The role of music in the French Revolution and its impact on society
• The evolution of punk rock music and its influence on alternative music genres

Music Sociology Research Paper Topics:

• The impact of music streaming platforms on the music industry
• The role of music in shaping cultural identity
• Gender representation in popular music: A sociological analysis
• The influence of social media on music consumption patterns
• Music festivals as spaces for social interaction and community building
• The relationship between music and political activism
• The effects of globalization on local music scenes
• The role of music in constructing and challenging social norms
• The impact of technology on music production and distribution
• Music and social movements: A comparative study
• The role of music in promoting social change and social justice
• The influence of socioeconomic factors on music taste and preferences
• The role of music in constructing and reinforcing gender stereotypes
• The impact of music education on social and cognitive development
• The relationship between music and mental health: A sociological perspective

Classical Music Research Paper Topics:

• The influence of Ludwig van Beethoven on the development of classical music
• The role of women composers in classical music history
• The impact of Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions on future generations
• The evolution of opera in the classical period
• The significance of Mozart’s symphonies in the classical era
• The influence of nationalism on classical music during the Romantic period
• The portrayal of emotions in classical music compositions
• The use of musical forms and structures in the works of Franz Joseph Haydn
• The impact of the Industrial Revolution on the production and dissemination of classical music
• The relationship between classical music and dance in the Baroque era
• The role of patronage in the development of classical music
• The influence of folk music on classical composers
• The representation of nature in classical music compositions
• The impact of technological advancements on classical music performance and recording
• The exploration of polyphony in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach

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What I’ve been up to lately

This blog will contain news, bits of writing about things I’m interested in, and occasional data science notes and tutorials.

Dr Craig Hamilton

I am currently working as a Data Fellowship Coach at Multiverse , helping to build an outstanding alternative to university and corporate training through professional apprenticeships. I work with individuals from a variety of organisations to help them develop and apply Data Analysis skills in their roles.

Prior to that I was a Research Fellow in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research at Birmingham City University . My research explored contemporary popular music reception practices and the role of digital, data and internet technologies on the business and cultural environments of music consumption. In the main this research was built around the development of The Harkive Project , an online, crowd-sourced method of generating data from music consumers about their everyday relationships with music and technology. I was also the co-Managing Editor of Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music , a member of the PEC-funded Live Music Research team, and the Project Coordinator for the AHRC-funded Songwriting Studies Network .

Outside of work, I continue to build on my 20+ years of working in the business of popular music, working as digital catalogue manager for Static Caravan Recordings and as a musician and recording artist with Independent Country .

I live in Birmingham, England, with my wife and sons and two unruly dogs, and when not working I enjoy collecting records, following Aston Villa, coaching kids football, and developing skills related to data science.

This website pulls together all of my personal and professional interests and projects. The views represented here are my own.

If you would like to discuss potential projects or collaborations around popular music, technology and data analytics, drop me a line

• Popular Music
• Digital Humanities
• Online Cultures
• Data Science
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PhD Popular Music Studies, 2018

Birmingham City University

MA Music Industries, 2013

BA English Literature & Media and Cultural Studies, 1995

Middelsex University

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Exploring podcast review data via digital humanities methods

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Some of the work I have undertaken in recent years, either as part of funded academic research or as personal projects

If you would like to discuss working together, or would just like to say hello, please feel free to drop me a line

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The Top 10 Most Interesting Music Research Topics

Music is a vast and ever-growing field. Because of this, it can be challenging to find excellent music research topics for your essay or thesis. Although there are many examples of music research topics online, not all are appropriate.

This article covers all you need to know about choosing suitable music research paper topics. It also provides a clear distinction between music research questions and topics to help you get started.

Find your bootcamp match

What makes a strong music research topic.

A strong music research topic must be short, straightforward, and easy to grasp. The primary aim of music research is to apply various research methods to provide valuable insights into a particular subject area. Therefore, your topic must also address issues that are relevant to present-day readers.

Also, for your research topic to be compelling, it should not be overly generic. Try to avoid topics that seem to be too broad. A strong research topic is always narrow enough to draw out a comprehensive and relevant research question.

Tips for Choosing a Music Research Topic

• Check with your supervisor. In some cases, your school or supervisor may have specific requirements for your research. For example, some music programs may favor a comparative instead of a descriptive or correlational study. Knowing what your institution demands is essential in choosing an appropriate research topic.
• Explore scientific papers. Journal articles are a great way to find the critical areas of interest in your field of study. You can choose from a wide range of journals such as The Journal of Musicology and The Journal of the Royal Musical Association . These resources can help determine the direction of your research.
• Determine your areas of interest. Choosing a topic you have a personal interest in will help you stay motivated. Researching music-related subjects is a painstakingly thorough process. A lack of motivation would make it difficult to follow through with your research and achieve optimal results.
• Confirm availability of data sources. Not all music topics are researchable. Before selecting a topic, you must be sure that there are enough primary and secondary data sources for your research. You also need to be sure that you can carry out your research with tested and proven research methods.
• Ask your colleagues: Asking questions is one of the many research skills you need to cultivate. A short discussion or brainstorming session with your colleagues or other music professionals could help you identify a suitable topic for your research paper.

What’s the Difference Between a Research Topic and a Research Question?

A research topic is a particular subject area in a much wider field that a researcher chooses to place his emphasis on. Most subjects are extensive. So, before conducting research, a researcher must first determine a suitable area of interest that will act as the foundation for their investigation.

Research questions are drawn from research topics. However, research questions are usually more streamlined. While research topics can take a more generic viewpoint, research questions further narrow the focus down to specific case studies or seek to draw a correlation between two or more datasets.

How to Create Strong Music Research Questions

Strong music research questions must be relevant and specific. Music is a broad field with many genres and possible research areas. However, your research question must focus on a single subject matter and provide valuable insights. Also, your research question should be based on parameters that can be quantified and studied using available research methods.

Top 10 Music Research Paper Topics

1. understanding changes in music consumption patterns.

Although several known factors affect how people consume music, there is still a significant knowledge gap regarding how these factors influence listening choices. Your music research paper could outline some of these factors that affect music consumer behavior and highlight their mechanism of action.

2. Hip-hop Culture and Its Effect on Teenage Behavior

In 2020, hip-hop and RnB had the highest streaming numbers , according to Statista. Without a doubt, hip-hop music has had a significant influence on the behavior of young adults. There is still the need to conduct extensive research on this subject to determine if there is a correlation between hip-hop music and specific behavioral patterns, especially among teenagers.

3. The Application of Music as a Therapeutic Tool

For a long time, music has been used to manage stress and mental health disorders like anxiety, PTSD, and others. However, the role of music in clinical treatment still remains a controversial topic. Further research is required to separate fact from fiction and provide insight into the potential of music therapy.

4. Contemporary Rock Music and Its Association With Harmful Social Practices

Rock music has had a great influence on American culture since the 1950s. Since its rise to prominence, it has famously been associated with vices such as illicit sex and abuse of recreational drugs. An excellent research idea could be to evaluate if there is a robust causal relationship between contemporary rock music and adverse social behaviors.

5. The Impact of Streaming Apps on Global Music Consumption

Technology has dramatically affected the music industry by modifying individual music consumption habits. Presently, over 487 million people subscribe to a digital streaming service, according to Statista. Your research paper could examine how much of an influence popular music streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music have had on how we listen to music.

6. Effective American Music Education Practices

Teaching practices have always had a considerable impact on students’ academic success. However, not all strategies have an equal effect in enhancing learning experiences for students. You can conduct comparative research on two or more American music education practices and evaluate their impact on learning outcomes.

7. The Evolution of Music Production in the Technology-driven Era

One of the aspects of music that is experiencing a massive change is sound production. More than ever before, skilled, tech-savvy music producers are in high demand. At the moment, music producers earn about $70,326 annually, according to ZipRecruiter. So, your research could focus on the changes in music production techniques since the turn of the 21st century.

8. Jazz Music and Its Influence on Western Music Genres

The rich history of jazz music has established it as one of the most influential genres of music since the 19th century. Over the years, several famous composers and leading voices across many other western music genres have been shaped by jazz music’s sound and culture. You could carry out research on the influence of this genre of music on modern types of music.

9. The Effect of Wars on Music

Wars have always brought about radical changes in several aspects of culture, including music styles. Throughout history, we have witnessed wars result in the death of famous musicians. If you are interested in learning about music history in relation to global events, a study on the impact of wars on music will make an excellent music research paper.

10. African Tribal Percussion

African music is well recognized for its unique application of percussion. Historically, several tribes and cultures had their own percussion instruments and original methods of expression. Unfortunately, this musical style has mainly gone undocumented. An in-depth study into ancient African tribal percussion would make a strong music research paper.

Other Examples of Music Research Topics & Questions

Music research topics.

• Popular musical styles of the 20th century
• The role of musical pieces in political movements
• Biographies of influential musicians during the baroque period
• The influence of classical music on modern-day culture
• The relationship between music and fashion

Music Research Questions

• What is the relationship between country music and conservationist ideologies among middle-aged American voters?
• What is the effect of listening to Chinese folk music on the critical thinking skills of high school students?
• How have electronic music production technologies influenced the sound quality of contemporary music?
• What is the correlation between punk music and substance abuse among Black-American males?
• How does background music affect learning and information retention in children?

Choosing the Right Music Research Topic

Your research topic is the foundation on which every other aspect of your study is built. So, you must select a music research topic that gives you room to adequately explore intriguing hypotheses and, if possible, proffer practically applicable solutions.

Also, if you seek to obtain a Bachelor’s Degree in Music , you must be prepared to conduct research during your study. Choosing the right music research topic is the first step in guaranteeing good grades and delivering relevant, high-quality contributions in this constantly expanding field.

Music Research Topics FAQ

A good music research topic should be between 10 to 12 words long. Long, wordy music essay topics are usually confusing. They can make it difficult for readers to understand the goal of your research. Avoid using lengthy phrases or vague terms that could confuse the reader.

Journal articles are the best place to find helpful resources for your music research. You can explore reputable, high-impact journal articles to see if any research has been done related to your chosen topic. Journal articles also help to provide data for comparison while carrying out your research.

Primary sources carry out their own research and cite their own data. In contrast, secondary sources report data obtained from a primary source. Although primary sources are regarded as more credible, you can include a good mixture of primary and secondary sources in your research.

The most common research methods for music research are qualitative, quantitative, descriptive, and analytical. Your research strategy is arguably the most crucial part of your study. You must learn different research methods to determine which one would be the perfect fit for your particular research question.

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216 Awesome Music Topics That Will Inspire Your Thesis

On this page, you will find the ultimate list of 216 brand new, 100% original music topics for high school, college and university students. No, it’s not a trick! You can use any of our topics about music for free and you don’t even have to give us credit. Many of these research topics on music should work great in 2023.

In addition, we have the best step by step guide to writing a research paper right here on this page. Just like the topics, you can read the guide for free. It will help you stay focused on what’s important and ensure you don’t miss any steps. And remember, if you need assistance with your academic writing tasks, our native English-speaking writers are the most reliable on the Internet!

Writing A Research Paper About Music

So, what is music? Music is a form of art that uses sound and rhythm to create an emotional or aesthetic experience. It can be created by combining different elements such as melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre. Music is a universal language that can be found in all cultures and has been an important part of human history for thousands of years. It can evoke emotions, tell stories, and communicate ideas. Music can take many forms, including vocal or instrumental, solo or ensemble, live or recorded, and can be classified into various genres such as rock, pop, classical, jazz, and many more.

But how do you write a research paper about music quickly? Well, we have a great step by step guide for you right here.

Choose a music topic. Select a topic that interests you and that you have enough background knowledge on to research and write about. Conduct research. Use a variety of sources to gather information on your topic, including books, academic journals, online databases, and primary sources such as interviews or musical recordings. Organize your research. Once you have gathered enough information, organize your research into an outline or a mind map to help you visualize how your paper will flow. Write a thesis statement. Your thesis statement should be a concise statement that summarizes the main argument of your paper. Write a rough draft. Begin writing your paper using the information you have gathered and the outline or mind map you created. Focus on creating a clear and coherent argument, and be sure to cite all sources using the appropriate citation style. Help with coursework services can aid you in succeeding with this part. Revise and edit. Once you have completed a rough draft, revise and edit your paper to improve its clarity, organization, and coherence. Check for grammar and spelling errors, and make sure all citations are correct and properly formatted. Create a bibliography or works cited page. Include a list of all sources you used in your research, including books, articles, interviews, and recordings. Finalize your paper. After making all necessary revisions and edits, finalize your paper and ensure that it meets all the requirements set by your instructor or professor. Proofread everything and make sure it’s perfectly written. You don’t want to lose points over some typos, do you?

Easy Research Topics About Music

• The history and evolution of hip-hop culture
• The impact of classical music on modern composers
• The role of music in therapy for mental health
• The cultural significance of jazz in African-American communities
• The influence of traditional folk music on contemporary artists
• The development of electronic music over the past decade
• The use of music in film to enhance storytelling
• The rise of K-pop and its global popularity
• The effects of music on our learning abilities
• The use of music in branding in the fashion industry
• The influence of the Beatles on popular music
• The intersection of music and politics in the 1960s
• The cultural significance of reggae music in Jamaica
• The history and evolution of country music in America
• The impact of music streaming on the music industry

Opinion Essay Music Topics

• Music piracy: Should it be considered a serious crime?
• Should music education be mandatory in schools?
• Is autotune ruining the quality of music?
• Are music awards shows still relevant in today’s industry?
• Should music lyrics be censored for explicit content?
• Is it fair that some musicians earn more money than others?
• Is classical music still relevant in modern society?
• Should music festivals have age restrictions for attendees?
• Is it fair for musicians to be judged on their personal lives?
• Is the current state of the music industry sustainable?
• Should musicians be held accountable for the messages in their lyrics?
• Is the role of the record label still important in the age of digital music?
• Should musicians be able to express their political views in their music?
• Does the use of music in movies and TV shows enhance or detract from the storytelling?

Interesting Music Research Topics

• The impact of music on athletic performance
• The use of music in advertising and consumer behavior
• The role of music in enhancing cognitive abilities
• The effects of music on stress reduction and relaxation
• The cultural significance of music in indigenous communities
• The influence of music on fashion and style trends
• The evolution of protest music and its impact on society
• The effects of music on Alzheimer’s disease
• The intersection of music and technology in the music industry
• The effects of music on emotional intelligence and empathy
• The cultural significance of hip hop music in the African diaspora
• The influence of music on human behavior and decision-making
• The effects of music on physical performance and exercise
• The role of music in promoting social and political activism

Research Paper Topics On Music

• The effects of music on the brain and mental health
• The impact of streaming on the music industry
• The history and evolution of rap music
• The cultural significance of traditional folk music
• The use of music in video games to enhance the gaming experience
• The role of music in religious and spiritual practices
• The effects of music on memory and learning
• The development of rock and roll in America
• The intersection of music and politics in the 21st century
• The cultural significance of country music in the South
• The use of music in autism therapy
• The impact of social media on music promotion and marketing
• The influence of music on the LGBTQ+ community
• The effects of music on social behavior and interaction

Argumentative Essay Topics About Music

• Does music have a negative effect on behavior?
• Is streaming music harming the music industry?
• Can music censorship be justified in certain cases?
• Is cultural appropriation a problem in the music industry?
• Should musicians be held accountable for controversial lyrics?
• Is autotune a helpful tool or a crutch for musicians?
• Should music education be a required part of the curriculum?
• Is the use of explicit lyrics in music harmful?
• Should music festivals be required to have safety measures?
• Does the use of profanity in music undermine its artistic value?
• Can music be used to promote political messages effectively?
• Should musicians be allowed to profit from tragedies?

Current Music Topics To Write About In 2023

• The rise of TikTok and its impact on music promotion
• The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on UK music
• The use of virtual concerts and live streaming during COVID-19
• The influence of social media on music consumption and trends
• The emergence of new genres and sub-genres in popular music
• Talk about cancel culture in music
• The debate over the use of explicit lyrics in music
• The impact of climate change on music festivals and events
• The use of artificial intelligence in music production and composition
• The influence of music on political and social movements
• The rise of female and non-binary artists in the music industry
• The effects of globalization on the diversity of music around the world
• The role of nostalgia in the popularity of music from past decades

Musical Topics About Famous Musicians

• The life and legacy of Beethoven
• The impact of Elvis Presley on rock and roll
• The career and contributions of Bob Dylan
• The influence of Michael Jackson on pop music
• The musical evolution of Madonna over time
• The enduring appeal of the Rolling Stones
• The career of Prince and his impact on music
• The contributions of David Bowie to pop culture
• The iconic sound of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar
• The impact of Whitney Houston on the music industry
• The life and career of Freddie Mercury of Queen
• The artistry and impact of Joni Mitchell
• The groundbreaking work of Stevie Wonder in R&B
• The musical legacy of the Beatles and their influence on pop music

Music Research Paper Topics For College

• The cultural significance of the accordion in folk music
• The use of sampling in hip-hop and electronic music production
• The evolution of the drum kit in popular music
• The significance of Taylor Swift in contemporary country-pop music
• The effects of drug abuse in the music industry
• The role of music in shaping political movements and protests
• The impact of streaming services on the music industry and artists’ income
• The significance of the Burning Man festival in music and culture
• The emergence and growth of Afrobeat music globally
• The role of musical collaboration in the creation of new music genres
• The use of autotune and other vocal processing tools in pop music
• The effects of social and political issues on rap music lyrics
• The significance of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in pop culture
• The impact of music on emotional regulation and mental health

Our Controversial Music Topics

• The controversy of the “cancel culture” in US music
• The impact of music piracy on the industry and artists
• The ethical concerns of music sampling without permission
• The controversy surrounding lip-syncing during live performances
• The debate over the authenticity of auto-tune in music
• The controversy surrounding the use of profanity in music
• The debate over the cultural appropriation of music styles
• The controversy surrounding music festivals and their impact on local communities
• The debate over the role of music in promoting violence and aggression
• The controversy surrounding the ownership of an artist’s discography
• The ethical concerns of musicians profiting from songs about tragedies and disasters

Captivating Music Thesis Topics

• The role of music in promoting social justice
• The impact of music streaming on album sales
• The significance of lyrics in contemporary pop music
• The evolution of heavy metal music over time
• The influence of gospel music on rock and roll
• The effects of music education on cognitive development
• The cultural significance of hip-hop music in America
• The role of music in promoting environmental awareness and activism
• The impact of music festivals on local economies
• The evolution of country music and its impact on popular music
• The use of music in advertising and marketing strategies

Classical Music Topic Ideas

• The influence of Baroque music on classical music
• The history and evolution of the symphony orchestra
• The career and legacy of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• The significance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
• The evolution of opera as an art form
• The role of women composers in classical music history
• The impact of the Romantic era on classical music
• The use of program music to tell a story through music
• The significance of the concerto in classical music
• The influence of Johann Sebastian Bach on classical music
• The contributions of Antonio Vivaldi to the concerto form
• The use of counterpoint in classical music composition
• The role of chamber music in classical music history
• The significance of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah in classical music

Interesting Music Topics For High School

• The history and evolution of the piano as a musical instrument
• The significance of Beethoven in classical music
• The impact of Elvis Presley on US music
• The emergence and growth of the hip-hop music genre
• The role of music festivals in contemporary music culture
• The effects of technology on music production and performance
• The influence of social media on music promotion and distribution
• The effects of music on mental health and well-being
• The role of music in popular culture and media
• The impact of musical soundtracks on movies and TV shows
• The use of music therapy for individuals with autism spectrum disorder
• The significance of the Coachella Music Festival in modern music culture
• The cultural significance of the ukulele in Hawaiian culture

Awesome Music Research Questions For 2023

• Should musicians be required to use their platform to promote social justice causes?
• Is music piracy a victimless crime or does it harm the industry?
• Should music venues be required to provide safe spaces for concertgoers?
• Is the Grammy Awards selection process biased towards mainstream artists?
• Should music streaming services pay musicians higher royalties?
• Is it appropriate for music to be used in political campaign advertisements?
• Should music journalists be required to disclose their personal biases in reviews?
• Is it ethical for musicians to profit from songs about tragedies and disasters?
• Should music education be funded equally across all schools and districts?
• Is it fair for record labels to own the rights to an artist’s entire discography?
• Should music festivals have more diverse and inclusive lineups?
• Should musicians be allowed to use drugs and alcohol as part of their creative process?

Fantastic Music Topics For Research

• The evolution of the electric guitar in rock music
• The cultural significance of the sitar in Indian music
• The impact of synthesizers on contemporary music production
• The use of technology in the creation and performance of music
• The influence of Beyoncé on modern pop music
• The significance of Kendrick Lamar in contemporary rap music
• The effects of misogyny and sexism in the rap music industry
• The emergence and growth of K-pop music globally
• The significance of Coachella Music Festival in the music industry
• The history and evolution of the Woodstock Music Festival
• The impact of music festivals on tourism and local economies
• The role of music festivals in shaping music trends and culture
• The effects of music piracy on the music industry
• The impact of social media on the promotion and distribution of music
• The role of music in the Black Lives Matter movement

Catchy Music Related Research Topics

• Is hip-hop culture beneficial or harmful to society?
• Is it ethical to sample music without permission?
• Should music streaming services censor explicit content?
• Is auto-tune a valid musical technique or a crutch?
• Does the music industry unfairly exploit young artists?
• Should radio stations be required to play a certain percentage of local music?
• Is the practice of lip-syncing during live performances acceptable?
• Is music education undervalued and underfunded in schools?
• Does the use of profanity in music contribute to a decline in society?
• Should music venues be held accountable for the safety of concertgoers?

Informative Speech Topics About Music

• The history and evolution of jazz music
• The cultural significance of classical music in Europe
• The origins and development of blues music in America
• The influence of Latin American music on American popular music
• The impact of technology on music production and distribution
• The role of music in expressing emotions and feelings
• The effects of music therapy on mental health and wellbeing
• The cultural significance of traditional music in Africa
• The use of music in films and television to create mood and atmosphere
• The influence of the Beatles on popular music and culture
• The evolution of electronic dance music (EDM)
• The role of music in promoting cultural diversity and unity
• The impact of social media on the music industry and fan culture

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• v.4(7); 2017 Jul

Significance and popularity in music production

Bernardo monechi.

1 Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI), Via Alassio 11/C, 10126 Torino, Italy

Pietro Gravino

2 Department of Physics, Sapienza University of Rome, Piazzale Aldo Moro 2, 00185 Roma, Italy

Vito D. P. Servedio

3 Complexity Science Hub Vienna, Josefstädter Strasse 39, 1080 Vienna, Austria

Francesca Tria

Vittorio loreto, associated data.

• Monechi B, Gravino P, Servedio VDP, Tria F, Loreto V. 2017. Data from: Significance and popularity in music production . Dryad Digital Repository . ( doi:10.5061/dryad.jc8kd )

All the data supporting our findings can be downloaded from http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jc8kd [ 43 ].

Creative industries constantly strive for fame and popularity. Though highly desirable, popularity is not the only achievement artistic creations might ever acquire. Leaving a longstanding mark in the global production and influencing future works is an even more important achievement, usually acknowledged by experts and scholars. ‘Significant’ or ‘influential’ works are not always well known to the public or have sometimes been long forgotten by the vast majority. In this paper, we focus on the duality between what is successful and what is significant in the musical context. To this end, we consider a user-generated set of tags collected through an online music platform, whose evolving co-occurrence network mirrors the growing conceptual space underlying music production. We define a set of general metrics aiming at characterizing music albums throughout history, and their relationships with the overall musical production. We show how these metrics allow to classify albums according to their current popularity or their belonging to expert-made lists of important albums. In this way, we provide the scientific community and the public at large with quantitative tools to tell apart popular albums from culturally or aesthetically relevant artworks. The generality of the methodology presented here lends itself to be used in all those fields where innovation and creativity are in play.

1. Introduction

Starting from the beginning of the twentieth century popular music has acquired a great importance in modern culture. Technological progress allowed for a massive and worldwide diffusion of musical genres and styles, previously confined in relatively small contexts and milieux. This diffusion process gave birth to a global musical culture, i.e. a culture in which a large fraction of the world population shares the same perspective about styles, instruments, famous artists and so on. In this context, music-recording industries have been playing a progressively more pivotal role, with a market value in 2014 estimated at US$15 billion [ 1 ]. Music albums have been central for those industries until very recent times. Digital sharing technologies decreed the so-called ‘Death of the Album’ [ 2 ], meaning a form of music distribution now being surpassed by Internet sharing and downloading, which allow listeners to buy and enjoy one single track at a time. Despite their recent decline, albums can still be identified as the main artwork created by bands and performers since they have long represented the final product to be sold to the public. As in many other fields of artistic expression, musicians and composers aim at achieving success and popularity, i.e. being known and appreciated by a large audience. However, acquiring such a status does not necessarily imply that their albums will effectively impact the overall production in their own, or other, cultural areas. Conversely, many important albums, even those with the potential of opening up new avenues, might have experienced only a moderate recognition by the public or been long forgotten due to ageing. We shall refer to this class of albums as ‘significant’ albums and this paper will aim at identifying metrics and tools to tell under which conditions a music album can be labelled as ‘popular’, ‘significant’ or both.

In recent times, also owing to the availability of large online databases [ 3 ], many efforts have been devoted to a quantitative study of cultural and artistic systems: from the development of methods aiming at identifying new relevant creations [ 4 , 5 ], to the forecasting of future popularity [ 5 – 7 ], or the study of the evolution of the features of a particularly creative field [ 8 – 10 ]. A common trait of many of these works is the focus on the interrelations between the creations, modelled as nodes of a growing complex network [ 11 ]. The identification of the relevance of a work is usually inferred from its statistical properties within the network and their dynamical evolution. In this paper, we slightly change perspective and generalize this approach by analysing a different network, namely a proxy for the conceptual network where creations are embedded. To this end we focus, without loss of generality, on tags, freely chosen keywords users attach to musical albums through a social annotation process [ 12 , 13 ]. We consider in particular tags associated with musical albums in Last.fm [ 14 ], a popular music website, whose users’ contributions bootstrap a bottom-up classification, usually named ‘folksonomy’, that reflects [ 15 ] specific features of albums. Though technically a folksonomy is represented by a tripartite network, with three distinct sets of nodes, namely resources, users and tags, here we focus on a projection of it, the network of tags. Folksonomies have been shown to possess peculiar statistical properties [ 16 ], have been studied in various contexts such as photo-sharing, blogs and web bookmarking [ 17 – 19 ] and have been modelled mathematically within the framework of complex networks science [ 20 , 21 ]. In [ 22 ], it has been shown how tags in Last.fm define a low-dimensional semantic space at the track level, highly organized by artist and genres.

In order to investigate the impact of each new album on the future production, here we take a dynamical perspective in which every new album modifies the network of tags either by enlarging the network itself or by creating new connections. In this way, tags form a dynamical network whose size and structure is constantly reshaped through the action of users. Following the notion of the Adjacent Possible , as introduced by Stuart Kauffman [ 23 ] and recently formalized through a Pólya Urn process [ 24 ], we can think about this network as the growing space of musical albums’ features. The application of Pólya Urns as generative models is not new in applied mathematics and complex systems science, and transcends the application to innovation dynamics and expanding spaces. The existence of reinforcement effects in the dynamics of complex networks, for example, makes them suited to be generated with variants of Pólya Urn processes [ 25 ], featuring the ‘rich-get-richer’ effect also known as ‘Yule process’ [ 26 ]. The application to innovation dynamics requires the introduction of conditions for the arrival of innovations as formalized for the first time in the ‘Hoppe Urn model’ [ 27 ] and extended in [ 24 ] in order to model the appearance of new elements as the consequence of the introduction of novelties. In the perspective of [ 24 ], the introduction of a new album contributes not only to the growth of the network, in its year of release and through its features, but also to open up new avenues, making some novel features accessible to other users and ready to be exploited by other creations. By means of this conceptual space and its indirect relation with the set of albums, we can predict ‘ground truths’, i.e. lists of particularly relevant albums according to the criteria of either success (linked to popularity), aesthetic or historical relevance (linked to significance). In this way, we can unveil the main differences between albums belonging to different lists, as quantified though suitably defined metrics connected to success or significance. Note that a similar approach using a different tagging system has been proposed in [ 28 ], where plot-related tags were used to quantify the degree of innovation of movies. The generality of our approach makes it suitable for application in other contexts where it is important to identify the fingerprints of future popularity or long-term significance.

2. Material and methods

2.1. dataset.

Our analysis is based on a dataset, we collected by crawling the Last.fm website in February 2015, with the dedicated API provided by Last.fm itself (the data can be accessed through [ 29 ]; details of the collection of the dataset can be found in the electronic supplementary material, section A). The dataset we collected stores information about music albums, released in a time frame going from 1950 to 2015. For each album, we stored information such as the number of times an album has been listened to through the Last.fm platform (denoted as Playcount in the following), the artists, the release year, the list of songs and all user-assigned tags. Multiple releases of the same album have been excluded from the sample, keeping only the very first release. Tags are usually single words or short sentences that users may use to annotate albums to ease future retrieval. To each tag in each album is associated a score ranging from 1 to 100 indicating how frequently it has been adopted by users. For instance, a tag with a score of 100 is very significant for an album, while a score of 1 signals a less relevant tag (see the electronic supplementary material). To each album, we associate the date of its first release and we do not consider its subsequent editions. Therefore, when necessary, we correct the release date of an album by resorting to another music information archive, MusicBrainz ( http://musicbrainz.org/ ) which contains the complete information on the release dates of all the editions of an album. Albums without information on their release date were filtered out of the dataset. The dataset was further filtered to correct for the presence of ‘over-tagged’ albums, namely tagged a lot by a small number of users. This results in a large number of tags with a boosted high score. As these tags are poorly validated by users, the classification of the corresponding album may be inaccurate. To solve this problem, we considered the correlations between the number of tags of an album and its playcount value, the latter being a proxy for the number of users who ever tagged the album. We used this information to identify ‘outlier albums’, which display more tags than other albums with similar playcount values, and reduced the number of their tags below a given threshold. More information about this tags-filtering process can be found in the electronic supplementary material, section A. At the end of this process, we remove from the sample all the albums without a correct release date or without tags, ending up eventually with a subsample of 163 829 time-ordered albums and 108 984 distinct tags.

2.2. Network of tags and topical representation

The tags associated with albums together with album release dates can be used to build a growing co-occurrence network of tags, by mutually linking tags assigned to the same album [ 13 , 30 , 31 ]. This network will be then adopted to define the properties of each album and its relation and contribution to the global music production. We start with an empty network at the first year of our albums set (1950). Every year a certain number of albums are introduced in the system according to their release dates. In this growing network 𝒢, an album is represented by a clique of tags that merges with the existing network through the addition of new tags, the creation of a new link between two already existing tags or the strengthening of a link as depicted in figure 1 a . It is in this way, that an album dynamically modifies the network and contributes to the global music production, possibly affecting future creations. To each node of the network, i.e. each tag , a creation time-stamp y tag is associated as the release date of the oldest album in which the tag ever appeared. In this way, the emerging network is a directed one with each link going from the eldest node to the youngest in terms of creation times. Tags created in the same year will be connected through a bidirectional link. The total number of co-occurrences of a pair of tags until a certain year y defines the weight of the link e =( tag 1 , tag 2 ), w ( e , y ), where we will drop the dependence on y whenever the network at the final year y =2015 will be considered. The final (at year y =2015) network 𝒢 exhibits a power-law distribution for the out-degrees and weights of links ( figure 1 b – d ). On the other hand, in-degrees distribution is not as broad as the out-degrees one. Though the total number of links is large (11 801 650), about 90% of them has weight w ( e )≤2. Figure 1 c reports the distribution of the absolute difference between the creation times of the pairs of tags connected in the network. Also, here one observes an heavy-tailed distribution pointing to the existence of albums with tags created in very different times.

Tag network dynamics and properties. ( a ) Pictorial representation of the dynamics of the network of tags. An album is represented by a clique of tags introduced in the network at the first release date of each album. In the above example, the new album contributes both to strengthen an existing link and to add the new ‘rock’ tag to the network. ( b – d ) Out-degree (red) and in-degree (blue) distributions, distribution of links’ weights and distribution for the creation time differences between nodes linked in the network.

We exploit the tag co-occurrence network to easily cluster tags according to a common topic through a community detection algorithm. A community of nodes (cluster of tags) is a subset of nodes more strongly connected among themselves than with the rest of the network. After removing the direction of edges, we apply the Louvain method of community detection [ 32 ]. In this way, each tag is assigned with its own topic according to the community it belongs to. We assume that all the tags within the same community bear a close semantic relation. Note that when considering the growth of the network at different time frames, the community structure might vary as it is likely that many communities would not yet exist at early times, while other communities would contain elements differing from those present at the final stage. However, we will assume that the topic of a tag is defined by the latest community structure referring to the year 2015. In this way, we are somehow looking at the music production from the present-day point of view. In the electronic supplementary material, figure B, we report the fraction of the total number of tags belonging to a subset of topics every year from 1950 to 2015.

2.3. Album features and impact metrics

We now introduce several metrics to characterize albums based on the tags co-occurrence network and the associations topics-tags. These metrics, summarized in table 1 , are meant to quantify some of the features of the albums, their mutual relationships and their impact on the overall production. We indicate a generic album as a , its release date as y a , the set of its tags as T a and the set of the topics associated with its tags as L a . Similarly, the set of all the possible pairs of tags in T a , each one corresponding to an edge in the co-occurrence network, is indicated as E a . Given the co-occurrence network, F ( l , y ) indicates the total fraction of tags adopted for a given topic l until year y , while T ( y ) denotes the set of tags present in the network until the year y . Given the significant correlation between the playcount values and the number of tags of an album (see the electronic supplementary material, figure A), all the metrics or the quantities involved in their definition are ‘intensive’, meaning that they do not explicitly depend on the total number of tags. We will define in the following the adopted metrics, grouping them in three clusters according to the main information they carry (for a more detailed definition of these metrics, see the electronic supplementary material, section C). Our first set of metrics is related to the ‘heterogeneity’ of an album, i.e. how diversified are the tags describing it. It has been shown in other contexts [ 33 ] that being heterogeneous can be an advantage in terms of acquiring popularity, because the more diversified the content, the larger is the variety of public who might be interested.

Metrics characterizing music albums and their relationships with the tag co-occurrence network.

Topical entropy E ( a ) is the entropy of the distribution of the tags T a associated with the album a over the set of topics L a , normalized in [0,1]. A value close to 1 denotes an album less biased on a single topic. If topics represent musical styles, the album with an entropy close to 1 can be considered as a balanced mixture of many styles. Heterogeneity can also be relevant in time as witnessed by the large distribution of creation times as seen in figure 1 d . For instance, classicrock and synthrock tags belong to the same topic but they have been introduced in very different times. Average time span TS ( a ) quantifies this kind of heterogeneity measuring the average creation time distances between the set of tags of an album, so that this metric is 0 if all the tags have been created in the same year. The average tag age A ( a ) is defined as the average relative age of all the tags associated with the album a , and it aims at quantifying the interplay between age of a tag and its impact or success.

The following set of metrics quantify the relationship of an album with the music production preceding it. The mainstreamness M ( a ) measures how different was the album with respect to the musical production before its release and it is defined as the distance between the probability distribution of the tags associated with the album and the global probability distribution of all tags associated with all the preceding albums. A value of M close to 0 indicates an album fully aligned with the previous production, while a value of 1 denotes strong originality.

Burstiness B ( a ) identifies whether an album has contributed to a significant increase in the production associated with a given topic. It is defined as the weighted average of the logarithmic derivative of the number of tags belonging to each topic in L a in the release year y a of an album (see the electronic supplementary material, figure C for a representation of the logarithmic derivative of the number of tags in some topics). A large value of B ( a ) means that the album was released in a year when one or many of its topics have experienced a fast relative growth, indicating that the album was created following an emerging trend. Finally, the novelty metric f new ( a ) is the fraction of tags in T a which are actually new at the time y a , which is a proxy for the innovations introduced by the album a .

Another interesting feature to look at concerns the notion of ‘possible’. Instead of looking only at the relationship of an album with its preceding production, one can focus on the new possibilities opened by the introduction of an album and its long-term impact on the network. Following Kauffman [ 23 ], the adjacent possible of an album a can be defined as the set of all tags unlocked, i.e. made possible, by the release of the album and of its associated tags. To be more precise, we imagine first the complete co-occurrence graph of tags as seen by 2015. This includes all the tags (and their links) ever adopted by the albums released during the whole time span considered. At the beginning of the evolution, this graph has not been explored yet and all the tags are grey, as in figure 2 .

Adjacent possible. Cartoon illustrating the structure and growth of the adjacent possible space after the release of a new album labelled with the three tags guitar , rock and blues .

As time goes by and new albums are released, tags are progressively coloured in green, meaning tags actually adopted for released albums (we shall refer to them as actualized ). A third category of tags can also be identified at each time step, namely tags belonging to the adjacent possible space of a given actualized tag, with the following definition. Given an album a released at time y a and its set of tags T a , a tag belongs to the adjacent possible space of a if it belongs to the adjacent possible of any given tag tag ∈ T a . The adjacent possible space of a tag tag ∈ T a is composed by all the tags that: (i) are neighbours of tag in the global co-occurrence graph; (ii) have been not yet adopted by users at time y a , and (iii) for which all its predecessors (i.e. all the tags with in-links to them) have all been already adopted by users. With reference to figure 2 , the tag Fusion enters in the adjacent possible space of rock because all its predecessors ( trumpet and rock ) have been already actualized. In other words, the adjacent possible space of an album quantifies the number of tags that are one step away from being introduced after its release. In more detail, we define Adj ( a ) of an album a as the average, over tag ∈ T a , of the fraction of nodes entering the adjacent possible space of tag during y a . This definition makes it easy to identify which part of the co-occurrence network is ready to be discovered by future music production, because all the ingredients necessary for its existence are already in place. The introduction of each new tag contributes to the expansion of this space of possibilities, because such a tag might be the last needed predecessor for other tags to become part of the adjacent possible space. A value of Adj ( a ) close to 1 indicates that almost every neighbouring tag of T a potentially triggered by the release of a is now very close to being adopted. On the other hand, a value of Adj ( a ) close to zero indicates that either the album features a set of tags lying in a part of the network already widely explored or that the album is too ‘avant garde’, because all the nearby part of the co-occurrence network cannot be adopted as the predecessors are not yet in place. In summary, the adjacent possible metric quantifies the short-term impact of an album, identifying how much of the potential adjacent possibilities are actually unlocked by the album itself. A metric similar to the one used here has already been introduced in [ 34 ] in the study of the cultural evolution of the production of movies, pointing out its relation with the cultural value of movies.

To quantify the long-term impact of an album on the subsequent production, we resort to an approach inspired to network resilience theory [ 35 , 36 ]. Given a certain tag ∈ T a , we remove such a tag from the network and, following its out-links, we iterate this removal process for its neighbouring tags until no further removal is possible. Links connecting removed tags are also removed, so that one ends up with a smaller network 𝒢 ′ . We now define uch ( tag ) as the fraction of 𝒢 destroyed by the removal of tag . Uchronia uch ( a ) is obtained by averaging uch ( tag ) over all tag ∈ T a (weighted to account for how many new albums adopted tag after the release of album a ) and it quantifies the impact of an album on future production.

Connected to Uchronia is Uchronia entropy , h uch ( a ), i.e. the variation of the entropy of the distribution of tags over the different topics, averaged over all tag ∈ T a . Uchronia entropy quantifies how much the removal of the tags of an album impact the topical distribution of tags. For example, a negative value of this quantity indicates that the removal has brought us to a more uniform distribution, destroying tags clustered around one or more larger topics. On the other hand, a positive value of h uch ( a ) indicates that the final distribution is more clustered, so that just one or few more topics gather all the remaining tags.

3.1. Metrics correlations and comparison with standard network metrics

Figure 3 shows the correlation matrix between all the metrics introduced above, the playcount values of each album and their age in 2015 (rows and columns within the dotted square). There are clear strong anti-correlations between the mainstreamness and the topical entropy of an album and between its two long-term impact metrics, Uchronia and Uchronia entropy . The interpretation of the latter case is quite trivial: destroying a large fraction of the network leads to a more entropic situation, where larger topics have been considerably reduced and the ensuing distribution is more uniform. The anti-correlation of the mainstreamness and the topical entropy expresses that small topical diversities are usually related to some specialized ‘niche’ albums, far from the mainstream production. Playcount values exhibit slight correlations (Spearman coefficients all significant but never larger than 0.36 in absolute values) with almost every metric except burstiness and average tag age . The small anti-correlation between playcount values and age (Spearman coefficient −0.14) indicates that being old does not imply a strong influence on the current success of an album, and this is probably due to the recommendation system of Last.fm , favouring novel albums. The relationship between all the metrics and playcount values are better shown in section C of the electronic supplementary material, file S1. The metrics introduced have also been compared with well-known network centrality metrics such as in-degree, out-degree, betweenness centrality and eigenvector centrality, corresponding to the rows and columns outside the dotted square in figure 3 . These metrics are computed over the co-occurrence network whose nodes are tags, and we assigned to each album the value corresponding to the average over its tags. We can see that these metrics are highly correlated with each other, and feature the same correlation patterns with the other metrics introduced in this work, i.e. they are correlated or anti-correlated in the same way with the other metrics. Hence, they seem to carry similar information regarding the properties of the albums. Unsurprisingly, they exhibit larger (anti-)correlations with the Uchronia, Uchronia entropy and adjacent possible metrics, which can be regarded as network centrality metrics.

Spearman’s correlation coefficients between all the metrics introduced in table 1 , plus playcount values and album age within the dotted square. Metrics outside the dotted square are standard network centrality metrics (in-degree, out-degree, betweenness centrality and eigenvector centrality). All the positive and negative coefficients were found to be significant, with a p -value considerably smaller than 0.05.

3.2. Popularity and significance

The popularity of a given album is strongly linked to its commercial success, connected, in its turn, to the number of people who have listened to it since its release date. Playcount values on Last.fm represent a good proxy to assess popularity. Through them we define as ‘popular’ albums with playcount values larger than the 75th percentile of the distribution (≈10 5 ) and as ‘highly popular’ albums with playcount values larger than the 90th percentile of the distribution (≈10 6 ). As already mentioned, popularity does not always coincide with significance. In order to go beyond popularity and quantify the level of significance of an album, we make use of expert-made lists of influential albums. In this way, we rely on experts’ judgements about what is ‘significant’ or ‘worth’ and we can investigate whether those albums feature important differences with respect to albums in the popular and highly popular classes. We considered in particular the following lists, easily accessible from the Internet:

• —  The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time according to the Rolling Stone Magazine (RSM; http://www.rollingstone.com ): a list of the 500 most important albums according to the votes expressed by selected rock musicians, critics and industry persons. A total of 387 out of 500 albums were also present in our dataset.
• —  The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time according to the NME Magazine ( http://www.nme.com ): similar to the previous one, it is based on the votes from current and past NME journalists. Here, 376 out of 500 albums were also present in our dataset.
• —  Grammy Hall of Fame (GHF; https://www.grammy.org ): a hall of fame to honour recordings of lasting qualitative or historical significance. Every record from any musical genre is eligible to be part of the list as long as they are more than 25 years old. We identified 322 entries in our dataset being also part of the GHF.
• —  The National Recording Registry ( NRR ) : a list of recordings that are considered culturally, historically, or aesthetically important or relevant to the American Culture ( https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/recording-registry/ ). We identified 230 entries in our dataset being also part of the NRR list.

Table 2 shows a brief list of the five albums with largest playcount values for every list. Despite the presence of some overlaps, the lists are quite different from one another and reflect different viewpoints on music production.

First five most popular album in the 4 expert-made lists. Playcount of Last.fm and release date are also shown.

Figure 4 shows the distribution of the release dates and the playcount values of the albums for the four lists compared with the whole sample. Both the RS and the GHF lists have a bias towards albums produced between the 1960s and the 1980s, while the other two lists seem to be less biased in this sense and more uniform in time. On the other hand, the only list that seems not to be biased towards popular albums is the NRR list, followed by the GHF list showing just a weak bias. Hence, we decided to merge the RS and NME lists and the GHF and NRR lists. In this way, we obtained two larger lists indicated in the following with the names ‘RS/NME’ and ‘GHF/NRR’, the first one being more biased towards popularity than the second. These two categories will be then compared with the popular and highly popular ones. Summarizing, we will consider the following overlapping categories:

• —  popular category : 41 053 albums with a playcount value larger than 10 5 .
• —  high-popular category : 7325 albums with a playcount value larger than 10 6 .
• —  RS/NME category : 619 albums considered important by the RSM and NME magazine.
• —  GHF/NRR category : 509 albums listed as within the GHF and the NRR.

Playcount and release date distributions. Comparison between the distribution of the release dates ( a ) and the playcount values ( b ) for all the albums in our datasets and those included in the four expert-made lists described in the text.

Figure 5 shows the behaviour of the metrics defined in the previous section as a function of time for these categories. The qualitative behaviour of the metrics restricted to one of the classes is usually quite similar to that of the whole sample of albums. However, it is evident that they usually display a higher degree of heterogeneity ( topical entropy and average time span are higher with respect to the whole sample) and have a small mainstreamness. In the electronic supplementary material, section F, we also show the playcount values as a function of our metrics for the four defined categories. Again we find qualitatively similar behaviours to the whole sample in every case, with very few exceptions. Finally, figure 5 shows the behaviour of these metrics in time. For many metrics the trends are trivial. For instance, the burstiness is higher for older albums meaning that at early stages it is somehow easier to trigger a great relative growth of a given topic; the average tag age A ( a ) and average time span TS ( a ) increase in time owing to the availability of older and older tags; novelty f new ( a ) decreases due to the difficulty of introducing new elements after a lot of them are already present (similar to what happens with Heap’s Law for texts and other systems [ 24 , 37 ]). Other metrics instead do not display clear monotonic trends. For instance, the adjacent possible metric related to the very next future stays more or less constant in time. Long-term impact metrics ( uch ( a ) and h uch ( a )) and the topical entropy E ( a ) feature instead a positive or negative peak around 1970 and 1980, indicating a time frame of great heterogeneity in which many influential tags have been introduced.

Time behaviour of album metrics. Average value of the album metrics as a function of their release dates. Black dashed lines are the averages over the whole sample of albums, while different colours correspond to different category of albums.

3.2.1. Predicting album category

From the plots in figure 5 , it is not easy to assess whether the expert classifications are somehow different from the overall sample and what are the differences among one and another. In order to see whether our metrics are predictive either of success or of the belonging to the RS/NME or GHF/NRR categories, we performed a random forest classification [ 38 ] using the album metrics defined in previous sections as predictors. For each classification, we use a training set corresponding to the 80% of our data points, chosen at random without replacement. In order to have a good and unbiased classification, we ran the algorithm by using 1000 random trees, weighting each class according to their size in order to compensate for the high unbalance between them. After having trained the algorithm, we built a receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve based on false and true positives rates in the remaining sample. The Area Under the ROC curve (AuROC) is a quantification of how good our classifier is. An AuROC equal to 0.5 means that our classifier is basically random, while 1 indicates a perfect classification.

In every case, we find that our predictors are generally able to classify quite correctly the albums: we have an AuROC equal to 0.85 and 0.92 for the classification of albums with playcount values larger than 10 5 and 10 6 , respectively; an AuROC equal to 0.89 for the RS/NME list; AuROC equal to 0.81 for the GHF/NRR list. In order to test the significance of the predictions, in the electronic supplementary material, section D, we show the same prediction for a randomized case where both belonging to a category and the playcount have been randomly reassigned among all the albums being released in the same decade. The classification for this randomized case shows a significant decrease of the AuROC for each category, being in most cases very close to 0.5.

The random forest algorithm (RFA) provides also information about which metrics are more relevant for the prediction. The RFA delivers a score by which the examined predictors can be ranked. These scores take into account the differences between the prediction errors obtained with the actual data, and a randomly reshuffled dataset [ 38 ]. In this way, we have information on what metrics have been mainly used to predict the belonging of an album to one of our categories and to eventually identify differences.

In figure 6 , we show the ranking of the metrics used for the prediction of our categories. Most of the metrics introduced in this work depend on the particular community structure we considered. In all the results discussed above, we used the Louvain method for community detection [ 32 ]. In order to test the robustness of our predictions with respect to variations in identifying communities, we repeated all the measures when the community structure is identified by using the OSLOM algorithm [ 39 ]. In the electronic supplementary material, section E, we show that even with this different method we are able to predict belonging to each category with almost the same accuracy. Moreover, the most important metrics for the various predictions remain the same.

Album metrics ranking according to the random forest algorithm. Ranked scores of the metrics used for the prediction of the four categories: ( a ) popular, ( b ) highly popular, ( c ) RS/NME and ( d ) GHF/NRR.

3.2.2. Popular category

The most important features for the popular category classification are the heterogeneity metrics ( E ( a ), TS ( a ) and A ( a )), followed by mainstreamness M ( a ) and Uchronia uch ( a ). Note that the popular category being the largest (25% of the sample can be considered as part of this category), it is also the one which is most difficult to classify as it contains albums with quite diverse features. In fact, the first three metrics in the ranking account for less than ⅖ of the total score and the score of every feature is comparable. Figure 7 shows the percentage of albums belonging to the popular category as a function of three pairs of the most relevant metrics: topical entropy E –average time span TS , topical entropy E –mainstreamness M and topical entropy E –Uchronia uch . In other words, we show the probability that an album belongs to the category popular conditioned on having a certain value for a couple of these three metrics. The distributions of these metrics and the ellipses of covariance at 1 and 2 standard deviations of the scatter plot of the metrics are also shown in order to highlight where the majority of the sample is clustered. The picture emerging from crossing topical entropy and average time span ( figure 7 a ) is what is to be expected from the relationship between heterogeneity and success. The probability that an album belongs to the popular category is enhanced by having both these metrics higher than usual and the peak of the probability lying outside the largest ellipse of covariance.

Top-ranked metrics for the category popular . Measured probability of being in the category popular as a function of pairs of the four highly ranked metrics used for the prediction with the RFA. Darker colour indicates bins with larger probability. The two dotted dashed lines are the ellipses of covariance of the two considered metrics with 1 and 2 standard deviations. On the side of the axes the distributions of the metrics are also shown. The couples of metrics used are ( a ) topical entropy–average time span, ( b ) topical entropy–mainstreamness and ( c ) topical entropy–Uchronia.

Figure 7 b unveils another property, which will be common also for the other categories: the probability of belonging to the popular category is enhanced for small values of mainstreamness (indicating great similarity to the musical production at the release time of the album), as can be seen from the fact that there is a peak of probability in the bottom right corner of this panel. This is not surprising at least for the prediction of popularity (we also refer to the electronic supplementary material, figure G), as too original albums might be perceived as weird and then not acquire public favour. Finally, the comparison with Uchronia reveals that the probability of belonging to the popular category is higher when this value is just slightly larger than 0, indicating that albums in this category usually have an impact to some extent on the music production.

3.2.3. Highly popular category

For this category, two of the most relevant metrics are again related to heterogeneity, but the main predictor in this case is novelty, which roughly measures the degree of innovation of an album. Mainstreamness is again important, which is not surprising for the same reasons explained for the popular category. Note that, unlike the popular category, now the first three metrics account for more than 50% of the total score. Figure 8 a shows the probability of belonging to this category as a function of the novelty and topical entropy metrics, similarly to what has been shown in figure 7 for the popular category. We can see that the vast majority of albums have a value of novelty which is equal to 0 (top histogram in this panel), but from the plot we can see that albums with a value larger than 0 are more likely to be part of the highly popular category. Moreover, we can observe in figure 8 a , b that similar to the popular category, highly popular category albums have small values of mainstreamness and large values of topical entropy. Hence, with respect to the previous prediction, now heterogeneity and adherence to the style of the year of release of the album make the album more likely to be popular. However, in order to acquire vast popularity, an album should also introduce some innovations to the music scenario, suggesting that the public rewards innovative elements with most attention.

Top-ranked metrics for the highly popular category. Measured probability of being in the highly popular category as a function of couples of the four highly ranked metrics used for the prediction with the RFA. Darker colour indicates bins with larger probability. The two dotted dashed lines are the ellipses of covariance of the two considered metrics with 1 and 2 standard deviations. On the side of the axes the distributions of the metrics are also shown. The couples of metrics used are ( a ) novelty–topical entropy, ( b ) novelty–mainstreamness and ( c ) novelty–average time span.

3.2.4. Rolling Stone/NME category

We have seen in figure 8 that this category is strongly related to popularity. In fact the main predictors are almost the same as for the highly popular category even though they are ranked in a slightly different way. However, mainstreamness and novelty seem to share a larger part of the total score. The fourth relevant metric that has changed with respect to the highly popular case is Uchronia, a long-term impact metric, though with a very small score.

In fact, in figure 9 we can see that mainstream albums (small M ) introducing a certain number of new tags (relatively high f new ) are more likely to be part of this category. A large topical entropy also enhances the probability ( figure 9 b ), while in the case of Uchronia ( figure 9 c ) we can see that the probability is enhanced when the value of this metric is slightly larger than 0, indicating the need for some sort of long-term impact in order to be considered important by music magazines. The similarity between the highly popular albums and those belonging to the RS/NME category is quite interesting considering that the RS/NME lists are expert-made. This fact might be the effect of the mutual influence loop between magazines and public opinion. From one side, magazines are biased towards what the vast public likes in order to maximize their sales, while at the same time the public is affected by influential magazines in their opinion of what is interesting in the music scene.

Top-ranked metrics for the RS/NME category. Measured probability of being in the RS/NME category as a function of pairs of the four highly ranked metrics used for the prediction with the RFA. Darker colour indicates bins with larger probability. The two dotted dashed lines are the ellipses of covariance of the two considered metrics with 1 and 2 standard deviations. On the side of the axes the distributions of the metrics are also shown. The couples of metrics used are ( a ) mainstreamness–novelty, ( b ) mainstreamness–topical entropy and ( c ) mainstreamness–Uchronia.

3.2.5. Grammy Hall of Fame/National Recording Registry category

The last category, obtained by merging Grammy Hall of Fame and NRR lists, is instead clearly not related to success and popularity. Besides mainstreamness, which is the second most important predictor, the other most important are in fact quite peculiar with respect to the other categories: burstiness, Uchronia entropy and average tag age. Considering burstiness and mainstreamness in figure 10 , it is evident that small mainstreamness and large burstiness are two main features of the albums belonging to this category. The picture is quite surprising when burstiness and average tag age are crossed together ( figure 10 c ). While it is clear that burstiness dominates the prediction as there are large conditional probabilities for large value of burstiness, average tag age must instead be kept small. Finally, the comparison with Uchronia entropy indicates that this long-term impact metric is important, so that the probability of belonging to the GHF/NRR category is higher when this metric is negative.

Top-ranked metrics for the GHF/NRR category. Measured probability of being in the GHF/NRR category as a function of pairs of the four highly ranked metrics used for the prediction with the RFA. Darker colour indicates bins with larger probability. The two dotted dashed lines are the ellipses of covariance of the two considered metrics with 1 and 2 standard deviations. On the side of the axes the distributions of the metrics are also shown. The pairs of metrics used are ( a ) burstiness–mainstreamness, ( b ) burstiness–Uchronia entropy and ( c ) burstiness–average tag time.

The criterion of belonging to this category is drastically different with respect to the other categories we have seen and definitely not related to the taste of the public. The fact that burstiness is the main predictor indicates that the albums present in the GHF/NRR lists are typically released whenever some topic was rapidly growing, so in other words these albums could have contributed to the emergence of some trend in music production. The small values of the average tag age instead indicate that the features of the albums were highly related to the particular historical period in which they were released. Finally, the negative values of Uchronia entropy indicate that such tags have a strong influence on the future albums. The result from mainstreamness again indicates, however, that though innovative, these albums are not distant from the musical trends of their times, indicating that also in terms of influence over musical production being too far with respect to what is generally appreciated might lead to negative results.

As a final remark, we must note that the adjacent possible metric was not among the most relevant ones in every prediction. This could either be due to a real irrelevance of this metric or to a correlation with other metrics which are effectively more important. In the electronic supplementary material, section G, we show the same plots shown before for the four categories in the case of the adjacent possible metric. These plots do not highlight a particular relevance of the adjacent possible space in any of these predictions. To shed some more light on the possible meaning of this metric, we show in the electronic supplementary material, figure I, that the probability of belonging to one of the categories considered above, conditioned on having a certain value of the adjacent possible metric, features a maximum before decreasing for large values of the metric itself. It seems thus that there exists an optimal stadium of exploration of the adjacent possible that is rewarded by every category. Too avant garde albums instead, which unlock a large part of the conceptual space, are not considered valuable either by the public or by music experts.

4. Conclusion

Popular music is a highly competitive world, where bands and musicians produce music albums and tracks rivalling each other in order to acquire public attention. Popularity and in general commercial success seem to be the driving forces of the system, so that the production of artworks has to cater to the public’s taste. However, there are other possible levels of importance that only experts in the particular field might be able to recognize. In order to assess and characterize the presence of this new kind of significance, we developed some general metrics aimed at describing the features of musical albums, their relationships with each other and with the global music production and their impact on it. These metrics have been developed using a dynamical space of album features represented by user-defined tags collected on Last.fm in 2015. This space can be represented as a growing network of co-occurrence of tags, where albums are described by cliques of tags attached to the network in their first year of release. The metrics we defined were then used to predict the belonging of an album to four different categories, two of which were linked with popularity and two built using expert-made lists of important albums. Our metrics have been used as features in a random forest classification algorithm, showing a great degree of prediction accuracy (values of AuROC larger than 0.8 in every case). Moreover, the RFA gave us information on which metrics were more important for the predictions, allowing us to have some insights on how an album belonging to a category typically is. We have seen that popularity is linked with heterogeneity, so a popular album connects different musical features which might also belong to a different period of time. Another important characteristic, relevant also for the two expert-made categories, is the mainstreamness, i.e. being somehow aligned with the general style of its own period. In general, albums which could have been found ‘too weird’ did not acquire popularity.

Albums belonging to the first expert-made category, built using the albums list from the RS and NME magazines, showed a great similarity with highly popular albums. In this sense, it is possible to argue that the level of significance considered in those lists is indeed success, which is not too surprising considering that music magazines have also to cater to the general taste. Finally, albums in the last considered category, obtained by merging lists compiled by the GHF and the NRR, are instead quite different from those having acquired success and can be considered as excelling in significance. This category takes into account cultural, historical and aesthetic importance, and albums belonging to it usually have a high impact on the future evolution of the tags co-occurrence network. Most importantly, these albums were released in a period of fast growth of the musical area they contributed to. In this sense, such albums might have been seminal for important future trends and the high impact of their tags indicates that they had a strong influence on their own field. It is important to mention that a large fraction of albums in this category cannot be considered popular, so that their significance cannot be related to success.

We think the approach proposed in this paper to tell apart significance and popularity is sufficiently general to be applied to other realms of artistic expression along with all the areas of scientific production. The evaluation of the scientific impact of articles and the importance of a scholar, for instance, is nowadays represented by the h-index, computed over the distribution of the scientific citations of a given element [ 40 ], which has been widely criticized due to its biases and its lack of accuracy [ 41 , 42 ]. Interesting future developments of this work might include the investigation of solid criteria to decree the value of artworks and scientific productions besides success and historical relevance, which could lead to new ways for their evaluation.

Supplementary Material

Data accessibility, authors' contributions.

B.M. performed the analyses; B.M., P.G., V.D.P.S., F.T. and V.L. conceived the study and wrote the manuscript. All the authors have approved the final version of the manuscript and gave their final approval for publication.

Competing interests

We declare we have no competing interests.

V.D.P.S. acknowledges financial support from the Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG under grant no. 857136. This work has been supported by the KREYON Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation under contract no. 51663.

Music Research Paper

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Introduction

The meaning of music and dance, performance, sacred performance, chant and recitation, instruments, critical musicology, globalization, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, nationalism, medical ethnomusicology, applied ethnomusicology.

• Bibliography

Ethnographic approaches to music and dance in the 21st century explore how modes of expression and performance practices are involved in the making of lifeworlds. Cultural production is situated in specific contexts that generate meaning as particular sonic and kinesthetic phenomena relate to discursive processes and social structures. Scholars of music and dance engage with cultural flow through dialogic encounters and interpretative analyses. These studies help illustrate how performance practices produce meanings, mediate socialities, and configure political relations.

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Ethnomusicology, which generally encompasses anthropology, dance ethnology, folklore, musicology, and sociology, situates specific theoretical issues in comparative social and historical contexts. Up to the late 1960s, the discipline explored and indexed the musical phenomena of non-Western cultures in ways that resonated with concurrent anthropological trends in area studies. Critical analysis of these approaches led to a rethinking of music in which music became not the object of culture, but rather the product and expression of human experience. In his writings on the relations between music and society, anthropologist John Blacking (1995) proposed:

We need to know what sounds and what kinds of behavior different societies have chosen to call “musical;” and until we know more about this we cannot begin to answer the question, “How musical is man?” As “humanly organized sound,” music is a bearer of meanings insofar as it exhibits and necessarily demonstrates a set of values that the society that generates it would otherwise lack. (p. 5) Relations between music, dance, and society are thus viewed as complex networks of interdependence through which a given act embodies temporal and emplaced experiences that structure social processes. Contemporary ethnomusicology pursues a rigorous analysis of how cultural production generates social significance by positioning the individual as the agent of social change through historical encounter. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Theoretical Approaches to Music and Dance

Musical and social structures mutually constitute each other through human interaction. This cultural-studies approach derives from the seminal work of Raymond Williams, who claimed that culture is not fixed as a bounded work or elite mode of production, but is instead embedded in everyday experience and activity. As a cultural materialist who challenged orthodox Marxist accounts of historical epochs or phases, Williams framed cultural practices as sites of political contestation through which groups reproduce and resist modes of domination, particularly those that critique industrial capitalism (Williams, 1977). Critical to his work are structures of feeling that configure the ways in which particular generations and social classes experience difference among social relations. These feelings beget a lived experience of a particular moment in society and history that brings meaning into the lives of individuals and the lifeworlds that they constitute. The production of cultural meaning is a fluid and dynamic process that emerges as a necessary process in which “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships, and kinds of relationship are continually being created” (Williams, 1977, pp. 122–23).

Musical meaning is not itself generated through aesthetic critique, nor by reference to something extramusical, such as an emotion, landscape, or harmonic figure. Rather, musical elements and structures discursively relate to lived experience by an act of representation that fixes musical experiences to metaphoric and metonymic structures, forms, and works. These bounded entities are placed in a network of complex relations that can be explained through systems of representation in which musical ontologies serve as interpretive frameworks for diverse musical systems, whether Western symphonic music, Hindustani classical music, or Japanese gagaku court theater, or for categorization of musical cultures as classical, folk, popular, and traditional. Categories, however, do not necessarily correlate to an intrinsic value, but more productively relate to “how they are used and embodied in community relations to become structuring forces in musical life” (Holt, 2007, p. 29).

Ethnomusicologists today explore the discursive production of musical meaning as a contemporary response to what comparative musicologist Charles Seeger (1977) problematized as the “musicological juncture” (p. 16), or the gap of representation that occurs when communicating about one system of human communication (music) through another (speech). To redress claims that music is “untranslatable and irreducible to the verbal mode” (Feld, 1982, p. 91), ethnomusicology suggests that musical practice is less a latent mode of (artistic) representation but rather a (socially) active and engaged mode of producing reality. If speech is the communication of “worldview as the intellection of reality,” then music is the communication of “worldview as the feeling of reality” (Seeger, 1977, p. 7). What we perceive as “feelingful” occurs through the “generality and multiplicity of possible messages and interpretations . . . that unite the material and mental dimensions of musical experience as fully embodied” (Seeger, 1977, p. 91). As suggested by interpretive approaches to cultural anthropology, ethnographers study not experience, per se, but the feelingful and discursive structures through which experience occurs.

Musical experience is constituted as meaningful when social structures conjoin with individual consciousness through structures of feeling. Whereas structures suggest fixed relationships that are rigid and determined, feeling inflects the intense and personal experience of what is “believed, felt, and acted upon” (Frith, 1996, p. 252). This becomes important with regard to the construction of cultural forms, whether musical genres and styles or social categories and spaces. How people behave with regard to sound relates to what they perceive and think about such behavior. Anthropologist Alan Merriam (1964) proposed a model of musical anthropology that triangulates these axes of sound, concept, and behavior. This tripartite structure has been redressed by an interpretive analysis of dialectical processes that consist of historical construction, social maintenance, and individual adaptation and experience; in other words, an agency-centered inquiry into how people create, experience, and use music (Rice, 1987).

Feelingful experiences occur through culturally specific processes that produce and perceive sound. Recent directions in the phenomenology of acoustic phenomena argue that sound is not the property of a musical object separated from its origin, but rather, sonic significance lies in the encounter of sound as musical. Sensory dimensions of experience suggest that sonorities may be heard as affective, feelingful, and emotional when perceived as musical patterns in specific cultural contexts. Phenomenological studies suggest the ways in which people relate to each other through senses of hearing. A hearing culture may make it “possible to conceptualize new ways of knowing a culture and of gaining a deepened understanding of how the members of a society know each other” (Erlmann, 2004, p. 3). In turn, individual and social processes perceive musical encounter “not through layers of cognitive categories and symbolic associations, but with a trained and responsive body, through habits copied from others and strictly reinforced, by means of musical skills” (Downey, 2002, p. 490). Listeners’ acquired habits of assimilating sensory experience to musical systems affect them viscerally, and lived bodies are fashioned by patterns of acting in relation to music at the same time that they are responsive to sonic textures.

Performance emerges through the interaction of corporeal gestures, discursive tropes, and performative utterances in social settings that situate these actions as musical or extramusical, verbal or nonverbal, cognitive or affective, sacred or secular. These actions are held together by aesthetic principles that are represented in the social and material world, just as the social and material world is imbued with extraordinary value. Performance and listening are intersubjectively and physiologically experienced in a trained and socialized set of artistic bodily movements that reflect values and ideas (Meintjes, 2003, p. 176).

Embodied realms of experience situate cultural practices in the physiological and expressive body and the social forces that operate through those bodies. Performativity asserts the materiality of nonverbal communication and expression and the presence of the body as it is mediated by the production of sound. Whether sound is produced by a singer, a musician, or mediated by technology, the presence of the medium leaves a material trace that regulates its origin (Barthes, 1978). For example, analyses of timbre consider the grain of the voice in recording—in addition to elements of texture, attack, delay, and pitch—and interpret studio techniques as signifying practices that are deeply connected to the discursive production of style and genre (Théberge, 1997).

Embodied performance by a socialized musician or dancer suggests how bodies may be regulated or may resist forces of power (Comaroff, 1991). The discourse of bodies in motion at Greek weddings, for instance, produces the dialectical relationships and mutual dependencies that are also regulated and constrained by their repetitive power as a body politic, or collective unit. By introducing nonGreek Roma musicians at wedding parties as daulia, or drums (Cowan, 1990, p. 102), Greek townspeople exert power over the materiality of both resonant and outside bodies. As sites of reception and agency, bodies bear narratives of time and place that coalesce into corporeal memories. The ways individuals perform these narratives construct identity and differences that endow sound and movement with the capacity to represent lived experience.

As forms of social action and as meaningful activity, music and dance create and give expression to human and social experience. Epistemological concerns have critically responded to the ways in which a kinetic body and a sound dialogically compose form through performance events, structured practices, and representational strategies. Rather than treat music and dance as objects of discourse that possess meaning in and of themselves, or frame body movement techniques and sonic phenomena as abstract properties that may be reconfigured according to context, ethnographers seek to localize the very terms by which understanding and knowledge of these performative dynamics are produced.

Music Research Topics and Issues

Music plays a significant role in preserving and transmitting the world’s religions in terms of history, culture, and practice. The study of music in religious practices considers the ways in which music transforms experience into sacred meanings, narrates religious myths, and structures religious ritual and communities. The performative conditions associated with religious practice consider sacred sound not as the taxonomy of a particular belief system, but rather as a sensory spectacle through which experiences become enchanted. The sacred nature mediates by sonic utterances that may induce a phantasmagoric state of being, encode sacred language, or embody affective experience. Sound indexes religious experience through the presence of sacred instruments and the act of listening to liturgical chant. Sound also marks sacred spaces through pilgrimages and festival rituals, among other religious practices (Beck, 2006; Berliner, 1993).

The efficacy of music in sacred spaces suggests the ways in which sound may be sacred and how this sacred nature may be mediated through sonic practices. How sound conveys sacred meaning and experience in specific contexts raises ontological distinctions in that what is often perceived as musical in European and North American contexts may be considered nonmusical and sacred in other sacred spaces.

Contexts may determine how sound is received and interpreted and in what ways sound may be ontologically separate from music. Interpretation of sound also structures power relations, in which religious authority is maintained by ideological boundaries of sound seeking to differentiate between sacred practices and secular forms of expression (Baily, 2003).

Ethnographies of sacred performance practices have tended to focus on the capacity of music, dance, and ritual drama to organize religious activity through modes of social interaction that produce webs of associative meaning (Reily, 2002). Performance has been conceptualized as a medium through which participants demonstrate religious conviction and commitment; as a means to structure time, narrative, and symbolic systems; and as a mode of interaction that codifies organizational patterns and the conditions of participation in religious activity. For example, the sacred voice is a medium that binds individuals communally in religious activity. How these experiences shape and are shaped by musical practice is determined by the theological ways in which individuals engage with music and music making. More recently, ethnographers have considered ways in which religious-ritual activity depends on the act of performance in order to be perceived as sacred and, in particular, how sound and movements are mediums that frame a ritual act as sacred. As individuals negotiate moral boundaries between the sacred and the profane in contemporary contexts, the act of producing sound and movement becomes a contested arena where religious authorities judge the ethics of cultural production. Performance through music and dance may allow departure from the profane and entrance into the sacred, mark the aesthetic boundaries of secular space, or itself articulate the boundaries between the sacred and the profane by which religious practices acquired enchanted and sacred meaning.

Several bodies of scholarship have addressed musical change, religious renewal, soteriological potential, musicoreligious orthodoxy, and other related issues. These different forms of religious practice, or syncretism, may be marked through distinct genres and styles that expose moments of encounter and uneven relations of power. In colonial spaces, religious repertory may occupy cultural spaces in ways that reproduce a hegemonic religious order and erase subaltern religious practices (Comaroff, 1991). Folkloric ensembles typically relate to historical or contemporary religious practices through complex processes of aestheticization that problematically blur distinctions between sacred worship, cultural traditions, and popular culture. These distinctions are in part based on a collective memory of the sacred that is translated through aesthetic ideals. The embodiment of these ideals demonstrates how religious ideologies are manifested through bodily practices that themselves produce sacred sound, movement, and performance.

The power of sound embodied in speech patterns, or chant, may preserve and transmit knowledge and religious authority as well as mark historical change. For example, the Rigvedic texts of the Harappan in Pakistan and northwestern India are considered sacred when correctly rendered through transmission and pronunciation of Vedic hymns. Recitation of these hymns occurs through three types of spoken accent with a melodic contour dependent on the succession of accent in the sung syllables, as well as the duration of each relative pitch. The consideration of Vedic chant as the foundation of contemporary Hindustani music in South Asia is, in part, attributed to its preservation through Brahman recitation. Codification of early performance practices, such as Gregorian chant in southern Europe, began when clergy notated plainchant in order to correlate its liturgical function with the medieval Roman liturgical calendar. Compositional practices that developed from these notations are widely considered to be the conceptual and historical basis for Renaissance and late European courtly arts (Bergeron, 1998).

Some religious cultures regard practices of recitation, or the sounding of religious text, as the divine act that makes speech patterns sacred by mediating the transmission of sacred texts through the vocal performance. The significance of such performances is governed not only by the syntactic conditions such as pitch and duration, but also by audition, or the appropriate response, performed by the ethical listener (Hirschkind, 2006).

Instruments embody religious experience when endowed with the capacity to produce sacred sound. In some ritual practices, performance on a particular instrument, such as batá percussion ensembles in Cuban Santería, realizes the divine potential of the ritual event and produces religious transformation. Instrumentalperformance practice marks the shift from secular to sacred contexts; produces the appropriate performance conditions for trance, ecstasy, possession, and other states of heightened sacrality; symbolizes tropes of religious narrative and function; and transfers knowledge and participation among believers (Hagedorn, 2001; Rouget, 1985; Wong, 2001).

Sacred musical practices are often narrative—telling stories and relating myths to generate a sense of historical and religious meaning. Narrative may be considered musical through, for example, the ways in which music marks the passage of time in ritual performance and in the narrative sequence of events, or through the juxtaposition of different musical genres that layer and texture religious stories. Instruments often play a significant role in narrating epic myths with sacred content, such as within bardic traditions or Sufi mysticism. One way in which narrative components of sacred music may shape a religious community is by mediating a sense of place. The act of recalling an original event, such as an act of martyrdom or a miracle, links the event to a specific site. When enacted through song and other musico-poetic genres, the act of recall layers subsequent events to that site in ways that parse history as locally meaningful in religious communities.

During the early 1990s, musicologists readjusted paradigms in which musical performance expresses a natural mode of human existence or formalizes a universal set of aesthetic ideals (Solie, 1993). The critical inquiry espoused by “new musicology” advocated for the deconstruction of ideologies into iconicities of style that are reproduced and transformed by acts of performance. Performance practices now produce social relations that are represented in different categories of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, generation, class and nation, and other forms of identity. Cultural meaning is discursively constructed by specific practices of signification, and links between signifier and signified are not fixed but arbitrary. These practices may construct meaningful experience in ways that depend on conventions of taste and class that are situated in a particular time and place.

Studies of place tend to be located in everyday life and explore the tactics by which people interact and engage with their environment. Gatherings, such as rehearsals among English rock musicians, are not only mediated by these practices, but also produce affective relationships to the settings in which social activities take place. Yet, as conditions of modernity separate space from place in lived experience, the physical settings of social activities are “thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them” (Giddens, as cited in Stokes, 1994, p. 1). Therefore, approaches to place, music, and dance seek to relocate cultural geographies within specific social, economic, and political spaces by addressing how individuals produce sound and movement in order “to reestablish their presence, situate events in a fixed place and time, and reembed actions within social structures” (Stokes, 1994, p. 3). Place becomes meaningful through affective processes that recognize and enable different experiences, mediate emotional relations to an environment, or produce nostalgia through acts of memory that bestow music and dance “with an intensity, power and simplicity unmatched by any other social activity” (Stokes, 1994, p. 3).

As individuals perceive what takes shape around them, they participate in the construction of a soundscape, or an environment structured by the perception and reception of sound. Soundscapes are differentiated not only by dynamics of power, class, and difference, but also by sentimentality, or the emotional and affective relationships that constitute a sense of place (Feld & Basso, 1996). An acoustemology of sound analyzes the sentimental relations to place that are embodied by sound production and reception among, for instance, Kaluli people in Papua New Guinea. Through interlocking, overlapping, and alternating singing that mimics bird calls in the rainforests, Kaluli voices index the natural environment; mediate places as sites of memory; and express an ecological sense of self, place, and time (Feld, 1982). Acoustic environments have also been critical to the historical progression of musical form in bourgeoisie European society and the displacement of instrumentalists to the role of musical interpreters. Early performance practices were comprised of extramusical, literary, or narrative material that was, in part, marked by a musician’s individualized embellishment of musical material.

In the 19th century, the concert room emerged as a performance setting that aestheticized the impression of immediate contact with the music as a listening ideal. Musical practices shifted to uphold universalist aesthetic ideals not only through listening appreciation, but also in celebration of a composer’s genius. Dramatic structures were communicated by composers such as Beethoven through “the abstract logic of pure form” and the formal properties of the music itself in ways that privileged structural-listening practices in European art music. Thus, the commodification of musical knowledge and musical emplacement fetishized sonata form in the historical development of instrumental Western art music (Leyshon, Matless, & Revill, 1998).

The commodification of musical place in a globalized world has induced a certain anxiety among critical musicologists over the ways that disembedding music and dance practices stimulates desires for authenticity by late-capital consumers in a hegemonic economic order. While the capacity for music to travel has augmented an appreciation for place and dismantled cultural borders, the poetics and politics of this have problematically differentiated relations between self and other. World music, and related configurations of art music, ritual, folk and ethnic genres, and world beat and roots music (Aubert, 2007), are authenticated by conditions of place. By privileging the geographically local as authentic, the particular can be naturalized in ways that fetishize locality through terms of belonging. The act of splitting sound from its source and reproducing it depends on uneven processes of representation that contest cultural rights and negotiate various modes of ownership (Feld & Basso, 1996). Styles associated with world music then demarcate community by linking dispersed places and allegiances that, through subjective identity, allow the strategies by which individuals register difference (Erlmann, 1999).

The globalization of world music has also been critiqued as a pastiche, or a process of reconfiguring time and space that detemporalizes the encounter between self and ethnographic others into an event beyond history, or perhaps at the horizon of a certain historical moment. For instance, the production and consumption of alternative folk rock links different historical moments into one bounded cultural space, while world-dance music may layer disparate local styles into a repetitive, temporal sequence (Erlmann, 1999). Cultural interchange and interaction in popular music thus depends upon a concept of culture that binds territory to groups in ways that demand the political engagement of cultural critique. Whereas narratives of cultural interchange such as hybridity, creolism, and syncretism tend to privilege myths of origin, postcolonial analyses encourage new approaches that no longer engender forms of being by binaries of self (self and ethnographic other), place (here and there), and time (then and now), but rather by a third space that is constituted by these boundaries.The circulatory relations of cultural flow have furthered understandings of how historical consciousness may undermine essentializing cultural strategies. Studies of the black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993) address how black popular music and dance styles shape and are shaped by particular African retentions and situate the Atlantic as a site of crossings, mediations, and exchanges that continually reconsider the cultural flow of African and African American expressive forms.

In response to large-scale processes of migration, globalization, and transnationalism that destabilize structures of belonging, critical approaches to place have also emphasized the production of locality through cultural practices. Tropes of place may uneasily mark displacement from an imagined structure of belonging, for instance when tropes of the crowd and the machine in the South African vocal genre of isicathamiya signify a sense of nostalgia for rural agricultural economies among populations who migrated to cities in search of labor opportunities. Another example can be found in how the mapping of memory fragments onto musical events, instruments, and kinship narratives of a retired Jewish community in Liverpool, England, shapes collective relations that in turn construct an immigrant neighborhood whose identity is nurtured by newly mediated and localized imaginaries of home and community. Locality may also be produced by sound-engineering practices that index a particular place and authenticate a musical style through the technological reproduction of sound in specific performance conditions such as “live” Austin country music (Greene & Porcello, 2005).

Gender and sexuality analyses situate performers and their texts within specific musical worlds and examine how these worlds produce gendered ideologies through performance practice, singing style, repertory, performance events and occasions, lyrics and elaborations, and instrumental practice. Thus, gender and sexuality are mutually constitutive of cultural experiences, and also mutually construct processes of subjectivity and alterity in ways that have been binarily opposed to biological explanations of lived experience. As a method of cultural critique, gender and sexuality studies analyze the ways in which ideology is maintained and transformed through the performance of a gendered self. These studies also examine the ways that musical practices mediate social relations as variously gendered—masculine, feminine, and perhaps hyperreal. Because gender theorists have understood sexuality as constitutive of gendered norms, distinctions between gender and sexuality have been largely premised on identity construction as theorized in psychoanalytic discourse. Lacanian theory argues that linguistic signs triangulate the enlightened self from its other in ways that destabilize a sense of identity by the desire for an object that might represent such identity. By reading social and cultural texts for hidden and repressed desires, critical theorists reveal conditions of heteronormativity that shape and are shaped by cultural practices. Ultimately, gender and sexuality studies suggest how social distinctions may be magnified rather than ameliorated by the performative act of music making and structured movement.

A substantial body of literature has been devoted to highlighting and documenting women’s contribution and women’s roles in musical performance. As professional entertainers, as dramatic personalities, and as audiences, women convey social values and transmit cultural meanings in ways that may be different from those performed by men. The expression of sentimentality by women through forms and repertoires, such as sung poetry among Bedouin women in upper Egypt, resist, maneuver, and maintain patriarchal norms of modesty, honor, and shame that have been typified in Mediterranean studies (Abu-Lughod, 1986), whereas songs sung by Berber women in northern Morocco strategically empower potentialities of marital life (Magrini, 2003). Performance events and contexts have been analyzed with discourses surrounding these practices through elements of lyrics, style, technology, and appropriate behavior. These suggest how identity may be encoded and performed as masculine, feminine, or ambiguously gendered. Postmodernist approaches to the paradigmatic relations between musical and social structures have produced seminal readings of the gendered hierarchies in composition, such as immanent relations between the masculine and the feminine in sonata form (McClary, 1991), formulations of the Western music canon, constructions of ontological difference through gender (Solie, 1993), and the potential of music itself—as a performance rather than as text, to disrupt the masculine musicological narratives within which it is often contained (Abbate, 1991).

The broad compass of vocal performance in different registers constructs gendered and sexualized identities by embracing some, and refusing other, conventions of style and genre. Voice may characterize a range of erotic and emotional relationships among women who sing and women who listen in ways that “resonate in sonic space as lesbian difference and desire” (Brett, Wood, & Thomas, 1994, p. 28). This sapphonicvoice is found in operatic practices by female singers who assume “pants” roles, or castrato male roles sung by women, as well as other singers and singing personalities (Brett et al., 1994). Koestenbaum (1994) argued that the brea between registers is a gendered split that emplaces a voice between male and female. The ways in which the brea is negotiated may be “fatal to the act of natural voice production” (p. 220) when gender and sexuality are transferred beyond normativity, such as the sapphonicvoice’s synthesis of register; this replaces its splitting, or the falsetto register’s failure to disguise this break. The combination of different registers may refuse vocal categories and polarities of natural and unnatural, and may establish interpretations of female desire, male desire, and the relations of class, age, sexual status, and identity through vocal performance (Koestenbaum, 1994).

The performance of gender engages with the kinds of subjects that musical and dance performances engender, both onstage and among audiences, and the ways that such performance relates to everyday life as lived, embodied, and theorized. For instance, a feminized atmosphere at a wedding in Morocco is not dependent on the presence of female dancers, but rather on the performance of femininity among communal relations that may differentiate between gender, sexuality, and class. Perceptions and representations of Asian American femininity have shifted due to North American taiko performance that represents social space through gesture, movement, and the presence of women in drumming practices. In post-Apartheid South Africa, Zulu ngoma song and dance is critical to the performance of masculinity and the anxieties of retaining the presence of individualized expression and stylized body movement in the midst of unemployment, an AIDS epidemic, and a history of violence in KwaZulu-Natal (Meintjes, 2003).

Critical race studies examine how constructions of difference on the basis of body type and color are perpetuated by the representation of essentialized metaphysical conditions. Concepts of race are linked to the emergence of modern scientific inquiry into the natural world and are largely considered a product of Enlightenment thought and observation. The late 18th century produced a world “observed, processed and remapped on the imagination of Europe” (Radano & Bohlman, 2000, p. 13) in which race and music constituted logics of difference that categorized the natural world and sought to make it understandable. Moreover, racial discourse contributed to the formation of musical difference as human difference was mapped onto musical difference, that is, to the object of music itself. The epistemic model that measured harmonic relations on a mathematically proportionate scale and unified differences in pitch influenced Enlightenment thought on the structure and substance of not only resonating, but also racialized bodies. How music participates in the construction of race and racial imaginaries ultimately raises ontological questions of whether music itself represents these qualities, or whether our understandings of music are shaped by and through racial relations.

Racial constructs are connected to music through structures of understandability, that is, the capacity of sound to signify and communicate meaning, and through materiality, or the technologies, objects, and bodies that represent music and musical histories through particular ideologies (Brown, 2007). For example, the 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner claimed that the language of European opera and vocal music was degraded through the inability of European Jewish composers to fully control the language of music, which Wagner instantiated in terms of 19th-century German universalism that was first and foremost predicated on language and an assumption that music instantiates comparative linguistic properties. Elsewhere, race interacts with other systemic hierarchies, such as the historic provision of wedding and court entertainment by Jewish musicians in predominantly Muslim worlds situated along the Silk Road, from Bukharan weddings in central Asia to the Abbasid and Omayad caliphates of the 11th century. Categories in which instruments function as a racial mapping of power relations may be critiqued by participants themselves, such as Karnatak and Hindustani musicians who negotiate caste systems in South Asia that distinguish between the permissibility of Brahmin performance on the Karnatic vinalute and the delegation of instrumental performance on untouchable leather-skinned drums to less privileged castes. Conditions of difference, shaped by cultural practices, help to better understand relations of power in systems based on class, caste, kinship, religion, and other forms of belonging and ownership.

Racial conventions of blackness, whiteness, and other morphologies play a critical role in ideological distinctions of music as rational and intellectual, or as orally transmitted, communal, and embodied. The naturalization of certain structures as African retentions, such as improvised movement, antiphonal oppositions, and repeated cycles of interlocking rhythmic patterns, reinforces the putative inseparability of music and dance in the African diaspora (Meintjes, 2003). This becomes problematic when what is musical and universal is defined against conceptions of blackness as physical and embodied.Yet, performance practice and histories may join as lived experience in ways that affirm how blues practices in African American working-class communities in the southern United States influenced the emergence of jazz, gospel, soul, R&B, rock, hip-hop, and other black vernacular music. The problem of race translates into a cultural critique in which creative strategies destabilize the tropes through which they emerge by means of intertextuality, subversion, and other signifying techniques (Radano & Bohlman, 2000).

Ethnicity, like other forms of difference that participate in processes of exclusion and inclusion, is constructed on the basis of shared beliefs in a “common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and elements in common, such as kinship patterns, physical continuity, religious affiliation, language, or some combination of these” (Shelemay, 2001, p. 249). Musical and dance practices instantiate ethnic relations by performing social boundaries that reproduce and subvert ideologies; these relations simultaneously also produce meanings, that is, “a patterned context in which other things happen” (Waterman, 1990, p. 214). Ethnic identity is often discussed in terms of minority relations and population movements that are themselves predicated on political difference. Often, ethnic boundaries “define and maintain social identities which can only exist in context of oppositions and relativities”; thus, ethnography can engage with how “actors use music in specific local situations to erect boundaries, maintain distinctions between us and them, and use terms such as ‘authentic’ to justify these boundaries” (Stokes, 1994, p. 6).

Cultural nationalism is a complex process by which institutions and actors integrate diverse populations into structures of national belonging. Ethnography investigates the ways in which music and dance practices—and the discursive spaces that are dialogically created and inhabited by such practices—generate national imaginaries in local contexts. Early forms of nationalism celebrated the universal claim to a single shared language and a set of particular customs and traditions situated in an ethnonational framework. Scholars have since criticized collective national identity as a product of state apparatuses that seek to reify lived experience into internationally recognized forms. Thus, the invention of tradition has been linked with nation-building projects in which state power emerges through the performance of national imaginaries and the efficacy of imagined communities (Askew, 2002). The extent to which symbolic production produces and sustains state hegemony through particular genres suggests whether these processes might be “multivalent, multivocal, and polyphonic” (Askew, 2002, p. 273) and how agents and institutions are involved in negotiating, defining, and contesting that which constitutes the nation. Musical ethnographies reveal the strategic shifts that characterize nationalist projects, ask whether events coincide with or interrupt official ideologies, illustrate why specific forms are chosen to represent the nation, and address how issues of authenticity and preservation are managed in these endeavors. Though global capital flow, access to electronic media, and transnational migration of people have decentered and deterritorialized processes of nationalism, the mediating structure of the nation continues to relate how people cross lines of difference through local transactions and cultural production.

Representation of the nation through music depends on a belief in the representational potential of music, that is, music’s capacity to embody a cultural whole that exists prior to its mediation. The production of national symbols, therefore, depends upon a modern discourse that is represented by cultural mediation. This discourse emerged from Johann Gottfried Herder’s claim that based national identity on the common narratives and histories of a given people and, in particular, on the capacity of language and folksong to represent such shared experiences. Herder’s proto-nationalist theory is comprised of a geographic model where music marks a place, such as the landscape of the nation, an acoustic model whereby sound distinguishes the nation as a whole, and a narrative model in which music encodes stories that represent the history of the nation (see Bohlman, 2004). The quintessential image of the nation, or a “preexisting entity that is more indefinite than definite,” is reflected by national music, “for whom it becomes the task to bring out as much of the definition as possible” (Bohlman, 2004, p. 83).

Conversely, nationalistic music does not harbor relations among a nationalized people, but rather services competition between nation-states. Nationalistic music secures the geographic identity of the nation-state by marking borders and producing alterity through the production of national difference. Alterity may be differentiated on the basis of class, race, ethnicity, and gender dynamics that exclude those whose presence prescribes the need to regulate desires and who trigger ambivalence as a condition of modernity. The marking of borders is instantiated by a presentation of the nation that embeds power in performance, or through a means of communicative interaction in which the act itself is privileged over that which it mediates. Thus, nonverbal performance may communicate messages whose meaning is located in elements of sound and movement and in dialogic interaction between performers and audiences, or between modes of modernity—contingent on the specifics of the temporal and spatial moment.

Early studies of population movement addressed patterns of assimilation and acculturation through theories of culturecontact that failed to engage with political disparities and the contradictions of multiculturalism in modern societies. More recent approaches redressed these patterns as a postmodern condition that negotiates instantiations of nationalism, transnationalism, and displacement through the appropriation of expressive culture and the making of political alliances among transnational populations (Garofalo, 1992). However, the rigidities and essentialisms of diasporic identity created by multiculturalism may articulate or contradict the politics of national, postcolonial, and minority identities even as they stress emergent forms of culture, uneven relations of cultural hybridity, and ambivalent relations to national homelands (Ramnarine, 2007). Contemporary diaspora studies thus emphasize the “newness” of the diasporic experience, and address political belongings and further substitutions as historically specific and shaped by a historical consciousness. Fragments of this consciousness are inscribed within an in-between space by which immigrants may register a sense of loss, exile, and rupture through cultural production. Diasporic music making may thus be a practice of everyday life in local communities by individuals making strategic choices through music festivals, individual biographies, song texts, musical instruments, and intellectual movements. Politically articulated readings of these social relations and creative processes reveal economies of desire in colonial encounters, performances that mourn and remember ancestors, intercultural borrowings in African-Peruvian theater, or state interventions in the creation of broader diasporic groups (Ramnarine, 2007).

Studies of popular culture and music have helped to differentiate between experiences of voluntary and forced migration. The actions and behavior of refugees affect how groups produce and give meaning to their music as they negotiate loss and trauma, and pursue a state of stability that is represented by resettlement. For instance, Vietnamese refugee communities in the United States tend to display a preference for love songs and Western-oriented popular music that convey anticommunist nostalgia for a pre-1975 period of French, U.S., and Japanese colonial influence in Vietnam (Reyes, 1999). Other histories of dispossession and violence have prompted ethnographers to consider the social construction of place, self, and other through aesthetic experience as a means for understanding the performative capacities of particular histories and repertories of violence and “the ensuing meanings violent performances carry for victims, perpetrators, and witnesses alike” (McDonald, 2009, p. 59).

Future Directions

Medical ethnomusicology seeks to integrate disciplines of music; health sciences; integrative, complementary and alternative medicine (ICAM); the physical and social sciences; medical humanities; and the healing arts through integrative research and applied practice. Research in music, medicine, and culture recognizes the dynamic and diverse practices by which specialized music and sound phenomena function as therapeutic strategies and as a means to cure illness and disease. Ethnomusicological discourse has demonstrated the extent to which specialized music emerges from a spiritual or religious ontology and is practiced in ritual or ceremonial events. When music combines with or functions as prayer or meditation, it may constitute preventive and/or curative practices that can be situated among a set of local medical practices. Medical ethnomusicology focuses on the performance of healing and the culture of health in order to better understand disease and illness, health and healing, as well as the performative nature of diagnosis, treatment, and healing. Recent studies and interventions include locating sites of ritual healing in ngoma practice among disparate communities; correlating beliefs about spirit possession to the intricacies of indigenous health care systems in Tumbuka communities; advocating and critiquing how the decline of HIV infection rates in Uganda correspond to the use of local musical traditions that support medical initiatives; engaging with science and religion through a focus on music, prayer, meditation, and healing; and the ways that these processes intimately link with transformational cognitive states in Tajikistan (Koen, 2008).

Applied ethnomusicology refers to work in the public sector that encourages the advocacy, curation, documentation, education, and performance of music and dance. These efforts apply the perspectives, principles, theories, and methods of ethnomusicology to encourage public awareness and participation in broadly defined fields of cultural practice. Advocacy engages with public-policy issues, such as arts access and participation, artists’ rights, censorship, intellectual property, and cultural heritage through institutional and noninstitutional efforts. The Society for Ethnomusicology debates and assumes positions on the ethics of music and fair use, music and torture, and the rights of human subjects in scholarly research. Cultural initiatives facilitate opportunities for performers and performance practices through festival and concert organization, recording and documentary film production, and museum exhibitions.

Efforts to document and archive materials are encouraged through the acquisition and digitalization of archives, collaboration between institutions, improved access, and the support of scholarship, publications, and public programs. Public education and outreach develop curriculum at the primary and secondary levels; establish performance ensembles and programs to nurture skills; and foster audiences and public awareness through the promotion and distribution of related events, productions, and publications. Performance of music and dance by specialists is encouraged not only as a research method in observing participants, but also as a means to preserve, transmit, and produce communities based on knowledge production and creative expression.

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