The Anchor Model of Musical Culture
Author(s)
Fritz, Thomas
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Abstract
In a recent cross-cultural study with participants from an
autochthonous African population (Mafa) and Western
participants, it was shown that the recognition of several
emotional expressions (happy, sad, fearful) in music are
likely to be music universals [1]. The Mafa listeners (who
were naïve to the Western music) were quite successful at
recognizing the emotional expressions in the Western
music, although their own music seems not to emphasize,
or even comprise this musical feature. Here I propose a
model, which is aimed at illustrating how different human
musical cultures intersect and “anchor” in a set of musical
features that are universally perceived, while also
displaying culturally acquired specifics (see Figure 2),
that accounts for the Mafa results. It explains also why
musical universals cannot simply be determined by
specifying the common denominator between the musical
features of all cultures, which may actually not exist
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Date
2010-06
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Text
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Proceedings