Ethnomusicology is the multidisciplinary study of music in its cultural context, investigating social, cognitive, biological, comparative, and other dimensions involved other than sound. Ethnomusicologists study music as a reflection of culture and investigate the act of musicking through various immersive, observational, and analytical approaches drawn from other disciplines such as anthropology to understand a culture’s music. This discipline emerged from comparative musicology, initially focusing on non-Western music, but later expanded to embrace the study of any and all different kinds of music of the world.
Jaap Kunst, early ethnomusicologist and creator of the term 'ethno-musicology', plays the Indonesian triton, beside other traditional Indonesian instruments
Frances Densmore recording Blackfoot chief Mountain Chief for the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1916
Note the number of Western and non-Western tunings that occur within the valid tuning range of the syntonic temperament.
Musicology is the scholarly study of music. Musicology research combines and intersects with many fields, including psychology, sociology, acoustics, neurology, natural sciences, formal sciences and computer science.
Music historian Jack Stewart lectures at a conference.
Rosetta Reitz (1924–2008) was an American jazz historian who established a record label producing 18 albums of the music of the early women of jazz and the blues.