Universals in the world’s musics

Abstract

Many decades of skepticism have prevented the field of musicology from embracing the importance of musical universals. When universals have been discussed, it has generally been in the form of meta-critiques about the concept of universals, rather than in positive proposals about actual universals. We present here a typology of four categories of musical universals and a listing of 70 putative universals in musics cross-culturally. These universals span a wide variety of features, including pitch, rhythm, melodic structure, form, vocal style, expressive devices, instruments, performance contexts, contents, and behaviors.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 307 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.