Many foundational questions in the psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has been conducted with Western participants and Western music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as strategies for overcoming differences in assumptions, methods, and terminology. This position paper surveys the current state of the field and offers a number of concrete recommendations focused on issues involving ethics, empirical methods, and definitions of “music” and “culture.”

In many musical styles vocalists manually gesture while they sing. Coupling between gesture kinematics and vocalization has been examined in speech contexts, but it is an open question how these couple in music-making. We examine this in a corpus of South Indian, Karnatak vocal music which includes motion-capture data. Through peak magnitude analysis (linear mixed regression) and continuous time-series analyses (GAM modeling), we assessed whether vocal trajectories around peaks in vertical velocity, speed or acceleration were coupling with changes in vocal acoustics (namely, F0 and amplitude). Kinematic coupling was stronger for F0 change versus amplitude, pointing to F0's musical significance. Acceleration was the most predictive for F0 change and had the most reliable magnitude coupling, showing a 1/3 power relation. That acceleration rather than other kinematics is maximally predictive for vocalization is interesting because acceleration entails force-transfers onto the body. As a theoretical contribution, we argue that gesturing in musical contexts should be understood in relation to the physical connections between gesturing and vocal production that are brought in harmony with the vocalists' (enculturated) performance goals. Gesture-vocal coupling should therefore be viewed as a neuro-bodily distributed aesthetic entanglement.

This article presents an analysis of small‐scale melodic movement in South Indian rāga performance employing the concept of coarticulation, defined here as the tendency for the performance of a unit to be influenced by that which precedes or follows it. Coarticulation has been much studied in phonetics and also explored to some extent in sign language and the kinematics of instrumental performance. Here I seek to account for variation in the performance of Karnatak musical units known as svaras (the scale degrees of a rāga) and gamakas (ornaments) through the phenomenon of coarticulation, thus providing an analysis of small‐scale melodic movement that focuses on the dynamic processes which form the style rather than on the categorisation of discrete elements. The material investigated is a video recording of ālāpana (improvisation) in rāga Toḍi performed by the Karnatak violinist T. V. Ramanujacharlu in Tamil Nadu, South India. A section of the recording is transcribed into staff notation and visualised through pitch‐contour graphs created in Praat sound‐analysis software. The hand movements required to produce the musical phrases are described from observation of the video alongside figures showing motion‐tracking data. Interviews with musicians, participant observation and the author's experience as a student of Karnatak violin provide the foundation for interpretation of the material. Results show that coarticulation can be seen between svaras through the oscillatory gamakas with which they are performed. Atomistic and gestural conceptions of South Indian music are discussed, following which suggestions are made for the implications of this research in modelling the Karnatak style, as well as for potential applications in musical information retrieval (MIR).

In many musical styles worldwide, vocalists manually gesture while they sing. Coupling between gesture kinematics and vocalisation has been examined in speech contexts, but it is an open question how these couple in music making. We examine this in a corpus of South Indian vocal music in the Karnatak style, containing audio and motion-capture recordings. Through linear mixed regression and GAM modeling, we assessed whether peaks in vertical velocity, speed or acceleration were more strongly temporally predictive for changes in vocal acoustics, namely pitch and amplitude. Kinematic coupling was stronger for pitch change versus amplitude. An acceleration-based model was the most predictive for change in pitch and also had the most reliable magnitude coupling with vocal acoustics, showing a 1/3 power relation. That acceleration rather than other kinematics is maximally predictive for vocalization is interesting because accelerations entail that forces are produced onto the body. Thus force-transfer may prove to be salient for gesture-vocal synchrony in this context. As a theoretical contribution, we argue that gesturing in musical contexts should be understood in relation to the body’s tensegrity structure and also vocalists’ performance goals. We therefore propose that gesture-vocal coupling should be viewed as a neuro-bodily distributed aesthetic entanglement.

Although it can be straightforward to define the features of physical traits, complex cultural categories tend to elude widely accepted definitions that transcend cultural and historical context. Addressing papers by Mehr et al. and Savage et al., which both aim to explain music as an evolved trait, we discuss fundamental problems that arise from their conceptualizations of music.