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Dear colleagues (with apologies for cross-posting),
I’m delighted to announce that my first book, Comparative musicology: Evolution, universals, and the science of the world’s music, was just published online by Oxford University Press. It includes forewords from Psyche Loui (Society for Music Perception and Cognition President) and Svanibor Pettan (International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance Past President). I’ve copied the book summary below. You can download it for free (open access) at https://doi.org/10.1093/9780191872303.001.0001 - I’d be grateful if you do!
I also published an accessible summary with audio/video in Nature, titled “Music is not a universal language - But it can bring us together when words fail”:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00565-1 [Un-paywalled PDF:
https://rdcu.be/e5gLE].
I hope you find these useful in your research and teaching! — Book summary: 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. —
Ngā mihi / Regards / よろしくお願いします Dr. Patrick Savage (he/him) Director, CompMusic Lab
Rutherford Discovery Fellow, School of Psychology, University of Auckland / Te Kura Mātai Hinengaro, Waipapa Taumata Rau (Room 302.349)
Associate Professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University / 慶應義塾大学環境情報学部
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