Tutorial

Abstract How can we quantify and compare musical similarities and differences within and between societies? How can we compare these with patterns found in domains outside of human music, such as speech or animal song? This chapter provides an interactive tutorial (https://tiny.cc/comp-mus-tutorial) to teach you to apply several key methods to a small sample of nine audio excerpts taken from high-profile comparative musicological publications, and then to compare these with a recording of your own singing and with global databases of thousands of recordings. The tutorial allows you to experience the promises and limitations of popular methods including: (1) subjective listening experiments (e.g., narratives and behavioural contexts imagined in response to music); (2) Western staff notation of melodies; (3) “Cantometric” ratings of musical macro-features (e.g., pitch stability, rhythmic regularity, timbre, vocal/instrumental organisation); and (4) automated analyses of microtonality and microrhythms. Ultimately, you will find as you complete the tutorial that there is no single perfect comparative musicological method—each approach has its strengths and weaknesses, and the choice of appropriate methods depends on the kinds of questions you want to ask and the kinds of data you want to compare. Once you have completed this tutorial, you will be better placed to understand the kinds of samples and analysis methods used in Chapters 3–6, and to perform your own original comparative musicological research. Data and analysis code are available at https://github.com/comp-music-lab/compmusic.