Comparative Musicology: Evolution, Universals, and the Science of the World's Music

By Patrick E. Savage

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Why do all human societies make music, but in such different ways? Scientific attempts to answer this question through cross-cultural comparison stalled during the 20th century and have only recently begun to make a resurgence.

In this book, Patrick Savage, a leader in this resurgence synthesises recent advances from musicology and related fields including psychology, linguistics, computer science, and evolutionary anthropology to outline ways to understand and compare all the world's music. He applies comparative musicology to longstanding debates including universal and culturally-specific aspects of human music; evolutionary relationships between song, speech, and animal vocalisation; and applications to areas including music copyright, 2nd language acquisition, social bonding, and cultural heritage revitalisation. In doing so, he argues for an inclusive, multidisciplinary field that uplifts traditionally marginalised voices and combines the qualitative methods traditionally employed by musicologists and cultural anthropologists with quantitative methods from the natural sciences.

The book is accessibly written using over 50 figures/tables and an interactive tutorial with audio examples, with each chapter designed to be readable/teachable on its own. It is designed to be appreciated by anyone from undergraduate students to senior professors, without requiring any specialised background knowledge.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198834071
• ISBN13: 9780198834076
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.13 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"