The Exceptions and the Rules in Global Musical Diversity

Area of Science:

• Ethnomusicology
• Computational Musicology
• Quantitative Social Sciences

Background:

• Global music diversity is studied through scientific (generalities) and humanities (exceptions) lenses.
• Traditional approaches to defining musical unusualness can be subjective and Eurocentric.
• Integrating quantitative and qualitative methods offers a more comprehensive understanding of musical diversity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an objective method for identifying and analyzing unusual musical styles globally.
• To combine quantitative outlier detection with qualitative analysis of unique musical examples.
• To investigate potential predictors of musical unusualness, such as social organization and cultural isolation.

Main Methods:

• Utilized the Global Jukebox dataset (nearly 6,000 songs, 1,000+ societies, 37 Cantometric variables).
• Defined song 'unusualness' based on the regional frequency of its coded musical style variables.
• Employed quantitative metrics to identify outliers and qualitative analysis for case studies.

Main Results:

• Identified outliers in musical diversity using quantitative metrics.
• Presented qualitative analyses of unique songs (e.g., Panpipe ensemble from Kursk) and repertoires (Malay, Kel Aïr, Moroccan Berber).
• Found weak evidence for social organization or isolation predicting unusual music; song origin was the strongest predictor.

Conclusions:

• Quantitative metrics can objectively identify musical outliers, supporting the existence of distinct musical styles.
• Combining computational and humanistic approaches enriches the study of global music diversity.
• Musical style is strongly tied to the society of origin, underscoring cultural specificity.