In the first chapter of the Titon and Slobin reading, it is argued that "although music is universal, its meaning is not"; different cultural groups have differing ideas as to what constitutes music and what is valuable in music, ideas that are "learned and transmitted from one generation to the next" within a culture and fortified by a lifetime of exposure to the music of that culture. Whether it be birdsongs of the noise of letters being rhythmically cancelled in Ghana, music is whatever the music-culture in question believes music to be. Traditionally, Western (but not only Western) music is marked by familiar terms: rhythm and meter (the "time-relation between sounds" and how quickly patterns are repeated), melody ("the part [of a song] that most people hear and sing along with), harmony (the formation of chords), and form (the "structural arrangement" of a musical composition). Titon and Slobin also suggest that a music-culture model be used when thinking about how people interact with music: the affective experience (the music), which is created by the performance (which adheres to "agreed-on rules and procedures" dictated by the music-culture), which is heard by the community (the audience that "supports" and "influences" the music), which ultimately develops a collective memory and history of the music (a process that becomes more and more ambiguous with globalization that can delocalize music from the culture that is creating it). At the end of the chapter, ideas about music and its uses are detailed, including how music interacts with belief systems (the Navajo use music to aid in the cure of diseases), aesthetics of music ("when is a song beautiful?), contexts for music (face-to-face performance vs. mp3s and the impact that the different contexts have on our interaction with music), and history of music (what does music do to reflect a culture's history and how has music changed over time?).
Question: is music a more effective cross-cultural communicator than spoken language?
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