The study of music is always, to some extent, "empirical," in that it involves testing ideas and interpretations against some kind of external reality. But in musicology, the kinds of empirical approaches familiar in the social sciences have played a relatively marginal role, being generally restricted to inter-disciplinary areas such as psychology and sociology of music. Rather than advocating a new kind of musicology, Empirical Musicology provides a guide to empirical approaches that are ready for incorporation into the contemporary musicologist's toolkit. Its nine chapters cover perspectives from music theory, computational musicology, ethnomusicology, and the psychology and sociology of music, as well as an introduction to musical data analysis and statistics. This book shows that such approaches could play an important role in the further development of the discipline as a whole, not only through the application of statistical and modeling methods to musical scores but also--and perhaps more importantly--in terms of understanding music as a complex social practice.

This special issue of Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology features thirteen articles representing empirical and philosophical approaches to music's cognitive, political, and aesthetic significance. The introduction, "Systematic Musicology Past and Present," provides an informative overview that locates the study of systematic musicology at UCLA within a rich tradition of interdisciplinary research. The articles in this volume address such diverse topics as music and film, tuning systems, notation, aesthetics and politics, and critical musicology. These articles exemplify the pluralistic perspectives of a field whose empirical arm intersects cognitive psychology, psychoacoustics, acoustics, and experimental semiotics, and whose philosophical arm intersects hermeneutics, phenomenology, and critical social theory. By contributing to a deeper understanding of music's importance as a creative human endeavor, these perspectives bring into focus questions of music's meaningfulness and communicability.

A collection of essays which address and critically examine issues in contemporary ethnomusicology. It explores ethnomusicology's shifting disciplinary relationships and plots a range of potential developments for its future

Bringing together an international collection of experts, this work explores various philosophical issues surrounding modern music recordings. With perspectives from practicing musicians, musicologists, sound artists, and recordings engineers, this reference asks how theoretical issues related to their work relate to the context of making and using recordings. Additional questions asked by this study include "What kind of spatiality is generated through recordings, and by what means? What is the nature of recorded space ? Do recordings reflect musical reality or create one?" and "What are the philosophical bases of an ethics of recording?""

Music offers a new insight into human cognition. The musical play with sounds in time, in which we share feelings, gestures and narratives, has fascinated people from all times and cultures. The author studies this semiotic behavior in the light of research from a number of sources. Being an analytical study, the volume combines evidence from neurobiology, developmental psychology and cognitive science. It aims to bridge the gap between music as an empirical object in the world and music as lived experience. This is the semantic aspect of music: how can something like an auditory stream of structured sound evoke such a strong reaction in the listener? The book is in two parts. In the first part, the biological foundations of music and their cognitive manifestations are considered in order to establish a groundwork for speaking of music in generic, cross-cultural terms. The second part develops the semantic aspect of music as an embodied, emotively grounded and cognitively structured expression of human experience.