Ethnomusicology

Jaap Kunst, early ethnomusicologist and creator of the term 'ethno-musicology', plays the Indonesian triton, beside other traditional Indonesian instruments

Ethnomusicology (from Greek ἔθνος ethnos ‘nation’ and μουσική mousike ‘music’) 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. Ethnomusicology development resembled that of Anthropology very closely.