How To Do a Musical Ethnography

An ethnography is the study of human activity in context. A musical ethnography is the study of human musical activity in context. Like all research, a musical ethnography must have a definite focus, one that you’ve planned before entering the context of the music in order to know the features to attend to most carefully (i.e., if you have nothing planned to look at, you may not see anything). Another reason to prepare a research plan beforehand is that it will put you into critical-observation-mode; it will prevent you from falling into the listening patterns you ordinarily use at a concert. This is especially important if you attend a performance of music that you are very used to, that you consider "your" music, and for which you have already established strong listening habits. It’s an ethnomusicological rule-of-thumb that the most difficult research to perform objectively takes place in your own backyard.

There are five stages to planning, performing, recording, and reporting a musical ethnography:

Preparation
Choose a concert, preferably one about which you can find some background information beforehand. The more information you have about the performers, their music, their audience, etc. before you are actually in the context of the performance, the better you observation will be.
Gather background information. You might look at sources on the genres of music that will be performed; you might find information specifically on the performers, if available; you might check the Web for reviews of concerts the performers have already done. Try to get an advance program, if possible. If the performers represent a particular nationality or ethnicity, you should look for general information on the group or culture to which the performer is indigenous. Especially valuable would be information on the kind of performance you’re going to hear in its normal (indigenous) context.
Decide on a primary and secondary focus. Your background research should provide you with a focus. If you’ve discovered information on the indigenous context of performance, you could compare it to the performance in the UCSB Concert Hall. For example, maybe you’re going to a concert at Campbell Hall to hear African drum music; from your research, you know that when the kind of music you’re going to hear is performed in its natural context (West Africa), the drummers are traditionally surrounded on all sides by people who call out the names of rhythms they want to hear. In that case, you might focus on whether the musicians try to communicate with the audience, or how they handle a less interactive audience that is further away from them. If you’ve not been able to find any information at all on the music/performers, you might simply focus on something you’re interested in. For example, you could observe how the audience responds differently to this music than to a concert of American popular music. Or you might analyze the order of songs, why the musicians might have chosen a particular song to start the concert, why a fast syncopated song followed a slower even piece. Or you might look at their communication among themselves. How does the leader signal the end of a piece so that they all end together? Or their use of physical space – do they leave the stage, when do they move around or exchange places?
Form a hypothesis. In all of this, you’re looking for patterns: you do not want your paper to be simply descriptive (e.g., first one musician moved to the right, then another musician moved to the left, then the middle musicians changed places, etc.); instead, you want to find regularities in their movements – (e.g., every time they use the big drum, the end drummer moves to the middle; or every time the music repeats a rhythmic riff for an extended time, all the musicians exchange places, etc.). The easiest way to avoid a purely descriptive paper is to form a hypothesis about your particular focus. A hypothesis is an educated guess about the outcome of your research. Perhaps you suspect that when African drummers confront a huge, removed, passive audience as they will in Campbell Hall, they decide not to communicate at all, and instead perform as though they were without audience. Or maybe you predict that the movement of musicians on stage will depend entirely on where the instruments are placed, so that when specific drums are played, the performers line up according to where those drums are located rather than carrying their instruments back to place; in other words, they move around the drum rather than moving the drums to their positions. Your hypothesis may be completely or partially wrong – whether you guessed correctly or not is unimportant, since the very act of forming a hypothesis has helped you think out the dimensions of your focus.

Important hint #1: Whatever you choose as focus, you should also decide on another, "backup" focus, in case you find that you’re prepared to observe something that doesn’t happen (e.g., the musicians never move at all).

Important hint #2: Write out a description of your focus with as many observable details as possible. In addition, make a short list of questions you would ask the musicians in regard to your focus. If you get a chance to interview/chat with one of them, you’ll have your questions ready; even if you don’t get that chance, having specified your areas of curiosity will sharpen your powers of observation.

Important hint #3: If you are able to interview one or more of the musicians and use the information he/she/they give you, your paper will automatically be raised one increment higher than it would ordinarily receive (e.g., a B+ will be raised to an A-, an A will be raised to an A+, etc.). However, in order to earn the increment, you must include sufficient evidence that you conducted a real interview (just shaking their hands, and saying "nice job" doesn’t count as an interview…..).

Field observation
Arrive on time.
If the concert has open seating, try to get into the best observation spot available. If you’re focusing on some aspect of the musicians’ behavior, sit as close to the front as possible. If you’re more interested in audience behavior, sit in the middle of an observable bunch.
If you can use paper to take notes without being too conspicuous, write down your observations as you make them.
If possible, go with a friend who can help you observe, or who can verify your own observations. Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve seen/heard unless you point it out to someone.
If you can’t take notes, and you can’t find a friend to go with you, try to maintain a silent conversation with yourself so that you can remember the things you observe; you will be surprised how difficult it is afterwards to recreate details that seemed so clear during the concert.
During intermission, if there is one, and after the concert, try to talk to other audience members to find out what they saw and heard; did they like the concert? Why? Did they notice the musicians doing something you missed? The trick to being a good field worker is to get information wherever it exists, to be able to start friendly conversation with strangers without being unnatural.
Post-event review
As soon as you get home, or as soon afterward as possible, write down all the observations you made. Try to remember verbatim comments from anyone you talked to. The easiest way to do a post-event review is to mentally relive the event; try to imagine the sense of the auditorium, the sound of the music and of the audience clapping. Recreate the overheated sensation of too many people in the same hall, or two few people in a space too large. With the help of the program, recreate the order of the songs, hearing them in your head. If you can do this successfully, all the original observations you made will return as they occur in the performance rerun.
Collect all the paraphernalia you brought back from the concert – programs, artists descriptions, your notes if took any, advertising for CDs or a CD itself if you bought one – whatever you brought back. Put everything together with your written post-event review away securely somewhere to retrieve easily when you get to the writing stage.
[IIIB. If your event featured local artists or performers you can contact easily, go back to them – or even email them – sometime a few days after the event with follow-up questions. You always think of things afterward that you wish you’d asked or seen during the event; if you can go back again with your reactions and talk to musicians or even audience members, you can learn a lot the second time around.]

Data analysis
This is the process where you examine critically the information you brought back and decide exactly what it is you found. Organize your post-review notes so that the information you brought back from the concert lines up with the questions you asked. If you find that a few of your questions lack information, you should decide if their answers are important for your hypothesis or not; if not, throw out the questions, if so, refer to IIIB. above, or repeat step IIIa. With the missing information in mind, and see if you remember any related features of the concert that you missed the first time. If you have information that doesn’t fit under any specific question, formulate questions appropriate for the information. It is important to have the results of your research organized in the same format so that you can evaluate its relative importance.
Ideally, once you have matched your questions with the information you have, it will be evident which questions were most important for your hypothesis, and which yielded useful but secondary information. Rearrange your questions with their answers according to their importance to your subject.
With your information arranged, the next step is to make notes as to what you might conclude from your information. This is the interpretive part of your project; this is the part where you attempt an explanation of what you saw. If, for example, you were right in your predictions that the musicians would fail altogether to communicate with the audience, you might decide that their uncommunicativeness had to do with language – they don’t speak English very well; or you might decide that, since they are used to performing in other circumstances, their stage presence doesn’t include yelling at the audience. Whatever you decide, remember that this is an opinion only; be sure to indicate that your conclusions are a matter of conjecture, not fact.
If you’ve been able to successfully reorganize your information according to your hypothesis, then you have basically laid out the organization of your paper.
Reporting your project
If all has gone well, and you have your information arranged as prescribed above, then your paper will simply document in a coherent way the entire process. You might have the following sections:

Introduction – Briefly give the name and a one sentence description of the concert you attended. Describe the focus you chose and why it is interesting. List the various hypotheses you considered, and then clearly state the one you finally settled on. Conclude the intro with a statement as to whether and how conclusively your hypotheses is borne out by your data (e.g., as it turned out, my hypothesis was generally correct, though it left certain details of the concert were unexplained…).
Description of concert – Describe the concert in detail, but taking care to include only the information that bears on your basic questions. You can decide how to organize this description in anyway that seems appropriate, but the easiest way is to walk the reader through the entire experience chronologically – that is, in the order in which it happened.
Evidence – Here, you discuss your hypothesis in detail, including the questions you asked and their relation to your predicted interpretation. Next, you go through your questions in their order of importance to the hypothesis; for each question, you include all relevant information. Finally, you list the questions that remain – the areas of relevance to the hypothesis that you would have liked to have answered, etc.
Evaluation – In this section you lay out the interpretation of your information, explaining in detail how you understand the significance of each question’s answer. Your evaluation should be thoroughly justified by the information you have presented, and you should carefully link each conclusion with its evidence. Restate your hypothesis clearly, as well as your final determination as to its accuracy, and support your answer. Sometimes a wrong hypothesis is more revealing in the long run than a correct hypothesis. If you were wrong in your prediction, try to isolate the reason logically (e.g., My hypothesis was a reasonable guess given the situation as I envisioned it; however, I failed to anticipate that the musicians would have microphones, allowing them to communicate as easily with the audience as they might speak to an audience in a more traditional context). Remember that you are the authoritative observer, you know more than your reader about your evidence, but be sure to acknowledge the extent to which your conclusions are informed opinions rather than facts you observed.
Conclusion – Briefly summarize what you did: the concert you attended, the focus you took, your hypothesis and its relative validity, and some statement of what you learned from the experience.
DON’T FORGET TO PROOFREAD YOUR PAPER CAREFULLY – better yet, ask a friend to read it over to find grammatical mistakes, misspellings, or typos.

— Good Luck! —

Grammar Pitfalls

1. Use apostrophes: John’s book; one book’s pages; two books’ pages; it’s (it is) an interesting book; its (the book’s) pages are torn; who’s (who is) reading the book?; whose book (the book of whom) is this?

2. Avoid incomplete sentences. An incomplete sentence is one that either 1) lacks a verb for each subject; or 2) includes a linking word so that the "sentence" is really a clause, not a complete sentence.

Ex. Wrong = Because I was sick. Right = Because I was sick, I missed my class.

Remember that so is a linking word not an adverb; correctly used, so means enough or sufficiently. It must be followed by a resulting consequence.

Ex. Wrong = I was so drunk. Right = I was so drunk that I couldn’t find my car (ie: I was sufficiently drunk that I couldn’t find my car; I was drunk enough that I couldn’t find my car; I was drunk and the result was that I couldn’t find my car).

3. Don’t use a conditional verb (a verb with would as a helper: would go, would have run) in a phrase following if.

Ex. Wrong = If I would go, I would see him. Right = If I go I will/would see him.

Wrong = If I would have gone, I would have seen him. Right = If I had gone, I would have seen him.

4. If you use a plural pronoun to avoid gender exclusion, you must use plural agreement throughout the sentence.

Ex. Wrong = Each student brought their book. Right = Each student brought his or her book; OR All the students brought their books to class.

5. Remember the difference between like and as or as though. Except for cases where it is used as a verb (I like cake), like is a preposition, & can only be followed by a noun (This cake tastes like a sponge) or by a noun modified by a phrase or clause (This cake tastes like the sponge I use to wash the floor); it can never be followed by a clause (subject + verb), unless modifying a noun, object of the preposition like. An easy way to tell whether like is used correctly is to replace it with as or as though; if the substitution makes sense, then like is incorrect and as or as though should be used instead.

Ex. Wrong = Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. Right = Winston tastes good as a cigarette should.

Wrong = I feel like I’m getting sick. Right = I feel as though I’m getting sick.

Wrong = I feel like I went to school with that guy. Right = I feel as though I went to school with that guy. Right = He looks like the guy I went to school with. ("the guy" is object of preposition like; the substitution of as though doesn’t make sense: He looks as though the guy I went to school with??)

6. In a series, the elements must be consistent in kind/structure.

Ex. Wrong = When I grow up, I want to be president, a social worker, or make the world a better place. Right = When I grow up, I want to be president, to be a social worker, or to make the world a better place; OR When I grow up, I want to be president, a social worker, or a person who makes the world a better place.

7. In a parallel construction (either/or, neither/nor, not only/but also, etc.), both sides of the construction must be of parallel kind/structure.

Ex. Wrong = Either I’ll go to the library or to school. Right = I’ll go either to the library or to school; OR Either I’ll go to the library or I’ll go to school.

Wrong = Not only was he smart, but also conscientious. Right = Not only was he smart, but also he was conscientious; OR He was not only smart, but also conscientious.

8. Avoid pronouns without clear or specific reference (i.e. pronouns that stand for something vague, general) or pronouns whose reference is not close by in the paragraph.

Ex. Wrong = None of the students had read the assignment. This made the teacher’s job difficult. Right = None of the students had read the assignment. This fact (or their negligence) made the teacher’s job difficult.

9. In a formal essay, avoid slang or other informal speech.

10. Avoid run-on sentences (i.e., a sentence with too many clauses or thoughts). A sure test of a run on sentence is to read it aloud; if you run out of breath before reaching the end of the sentence, it may be too long.

11. Use semicolons (;) and colons (:) correctly. A semicolon divides two phrases or parts of a sentence that belong together; it is less "terminating" than a period (.). A colon implies that what follows characterizes or specifies a more general description in the main sentence; it often implies "the following…" or "that is to say…".

Ex. Wrong = He needed to buy many things at the store; apples, eggs, and thumbtacks. Right = He needed to buy many things at the store: apples, eggs, and thumbtacks (he needed to buy the following things at the store: apples, etc.).

Wrong = He was in a hurry: he had overslept. Right = He was in a hurry; he had overslept.

12. Watch out for dangling modifiers (modifying phrases/clauses that describe something other than the nearest noun.

Ex. Wrong = I was late, and running to catch the bus, the stick tripped me (implies that the stick is running to catch the bus). Right = I was late, and running to catch the bus, I tripped on the stick. (running describes I).

Wrong = Sally loved to read. Because she was very bright, the teacher made an extra effort to interest her. (Who is bright, the teacher or Sally?)

Right = Sally loved to read. Because the student was very bright, the teacher…..

13. When using two or more pronouns together, remember the difference between subject pronouns (he/she and I, they and I, you and she) and object pronouns (me and him/her, you and them). If you can’t remember which a pronoun should be, a good way to tell is to try a single pronoun first.

Ex. Wrong = He invited Sally and I (He invited I??) Right = He invited her and me (He invited her; he invited me).

Wrong = Tom and me are going to the store (Me is going to the store??) Right = Tom and I are going to the store (I am going to the store.).

14. Remember the difference between lay (past tense: laid) and lie (past tense: lay). Lay is a transitive verb; that is, it must have an object (you lay a book on the table; a chicken lays an egg; you laid a book on the table yesterday; a chicken laid an egg yesterday). Lie is intransitive; that is, it never has an object (I lie on the bed; the cloth lies on the table; I lay on the bed yesterday; the cloth lay on the table yesterday)

Ex. Wrong = He lays down to rest. Right = He lies down to rest.

Wrong = He laid down an hour ago. Right = He lay down an hour ago.

Wrong = Past tense: He lay the book on the table yesterday. Right = Past tense: He laid the book on the table yesterday, or Present tense: He lays the book on the table while I watch.

15. If you use any source of information (including the Web, lectures in class, advice from a friend, handouts from any class, a show on PBS, a book or article, etc.), you should cite that source in two places: 1) in the text following the information donated by the source (whether you quote it directly or not; even if you paraphrase, it is still someone else’s information); and 2) in a bibliography at the end of your paper, in footnotes at the bottom of each page, or in endnotes at the end of your paper. If you use footnotes or endnotes, your in-text citation should be no more than the number of the note that goes with it. Here are examples of possible citation formats:

Bibliography form

In text: The population of Los Angeles in 1930 was x million (Shafer, p. 40).

In bib:

(book): Shafer, A.S. California Demographics in 1930. New York: Random House, 1995.

(collected papers in a book): Shafer, A.S. California Demographics in 1930, in US Demographics, C. Smith, Ed., New York: Random House, 1995.

(journal article): Shafer, A.S. (1995). California Demographics in 1930, Journal of American Demographics, Vol. III, no. 2, pp. 36-46.

Foot- or endnote form

in text: The population of Los Angeles in 1930 was x million.

in note: Shafer, A.S. California Demographics in 1930. New York: Random House, 1995, p. 40.

(collected papers in a book): 1Shafer, A.S. California Demographics in 1930, in US Demographics, C. Smith, Ed., New York: Random House, 1995, p. 40.

(journal article): 1Shafer, A.S. (1995). California Demographics in 1930, Journal of American Demographics, Vol. III, no, 2 p. 40.

In general, you can use any form you like, as long as you have a short citation in the text and a full citation elsewhere giving all the information included in the examples above. Whatever form you use, you should keep it consistent throughout the paper.

Handy Hint: Many of these grammar pitfalls can be avoided by doing a "manual spell-check". For example, for # 2), you can do a search for so and make sure that each time so occurs, it is linked to a phrase expressing the resulting consequence. For # 3), do a search for would. to verify that each instance should indeed be a conditional tense. For # 5), a search to check that each instance of like you find is either a verb (I like African music), a preposition followed by a noun (This song sounds like a lullaby.), or by a noun modified by a clause (This song sounds like the lullaby my mother sang to me when I was small); but not a dependent clause (this song sounds like it would wake up the dead). Do a search for either, neither, or not only (check parallel construction, # 7); do a search for colons and semi-colons (# 11), and for lie and lay in all their tenses (# 14). Even if you don’t catch all the pitfalls, each mistake you find makes your paper one degree better!

Ethnomusicology Terminology

Please note that many of these terms have different, broader, or narrower meanings in other fields or general parlance. In Music 17 they will be used according to the definitions below.

Acculturation: the process by which one culture influences another, resulting in changes to either or both; usually brought about by direct or indirect contact between cultures.

Aerophone: an instrument on which the primary vibrating device is a column of air. Common aerophones are flutes, oboes, and the voice.

Articulation: specific method of playing an instrument or singing that contributes to the expressiveness or meaning of a piece of music. Frequently, articulation is a less formal part of performance practice, sometimes unique to individual performers, and often not included in the notation of written music. A frequent objective of articulation – sometimes called "phrasing" - is to separate a continuous musical line into smaller units or phrases.

Ballad: a type of narrative song whose lyrics tell a story; the plot is often dramatic, the text may include dialogue between characters in the story, and the structure may be strophic (see strophic form) with repeated refrains.

Borrowing: the process of adopting musical features – including instruments, genres, or concepts – from another culture.

Calendric (or calendrical) ritual: the celebration of an event of sacred or secular significance that occurs at regular time intervals in a culture’s calendar (e.g., yearly or biannually). The collection of rituals enacted by a specific culture is referred to as a "ritual cycle."

Call and response form: a musical structure that imitates a conversation between instruments or singers. In C&R form, one or a small group of performers sing/play a line or short part that is "answered" by another – usually but not always larger – group of performers. In western music, this structure may be called antiphonal.

Chord: a group of three or more notes sounding simultaneously and perceived as a (vertical) unit.

Chordaphone (cordaphone): an instrument on which the primary vibrating device is a string of some kind. Common chordaphones are guitars and fiddles.

Contour: the overall "shape" of a melody. For instance, a melody that begins on a high note and gradually moves down to end on a low note (think of the first two lines of "Joy to the World") might be described as having a descending contour.

Cross rhythm: different metric patterns occurring at the same time.

Diffusion: the transmission or spread of cultural and musical features from one society or culture to another; diffusion occurs through processes like borrowing and acculturation.

Drone: a single tone held constant through a piece or a large section of music while other parts vary around it; it is usually one of the lowest pitches (think of bagpipes).

Dynamics: degrees or variations of volume. A piece described as having a "wide dynamic range or variation" would be one that varied in loudness over time.

-emic: a quality signifying relevance to an indigenous group, as viewed from an "outsider’s" point of view (see –etic).

Epic: an extended narrative genre, often documenting historical events of significance to a culture, recounting heroic exploits of a cultural hero, or reciting important genealogies.

Ethnocentrism: the tendency to interpret or evaluate all human behavior according to the norms of one’s own society or group; often an ethnocentric observer assumes the superiority of his/her own perspective, regarding other practices as inferior.

Ethnography: the study of human culture in its natural context, performing its natural activities.

-etic: a quality signifying relevance to an outside observer rather than to the people being observed. A fieldworker who never considers –emic values but imposes his/her own –etic interpretation on the events or customs observed can be said to be ethnocentric.

Falsetto: a vocal quality produced above the "natural" singing range; usually used in reference to male voices.

Free rhythm: without a regular meter; without consistent patterns of accent, stress, and rests.

Genre: a category or kind of music, usually defined by function, major instrument, context of performance, or some other perceived quality characteristic of its members.

Glissando: a rapid "slide" or "glide" through a series of consecutive tones. For example, on the piano, a glissando is produced by running the nail of the thumb down or up the keys.

Harmony: in a narrow sense, the relationship, progression, and musical structures formed by successive chords; in a broad sense, the term is used to mean multipart music. There are different standards and aesthetics concerning which sounds "harmonize" – which sounds are considered to be a pleasing combination.

Heterophony: music in which two or more versions of the "same" melody are performed simultaneously, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by accident. The melody is modified, often using ornaments that are characteristic of the particular instruments.

Hocket: a melodic pattern formed by the coordination of various pitches/rhythms played successively by more than one performer; interlocking pitches played by two or sound sources to create a single melody.

Idiophone: an instrument which is itself the primary vibrating device, or on which the vibrating device and the resonator are the same parts. Common idiophones are rattles and rhythm sticks.

Improvisation: music which is not "composed" either in written or memorized form, but is performed more or less "spontaneously". Whatever the degree of improvisation in a piece of music, it generally has formal rules and constraints that guide the performers.

Indigenous: of or relating to the population born and raised (native to) in a location.

Interval: the difference (or "space") between two tones or pitches.

Life cycle ritual: the celebration of an event of sacred or secular significance occurring at specific points in an individual’s life (e.g., a coming-of-age ritual, a wedding ritual, a funeral ritual). The collection of rituals enacted on behalf of a specific individual is referred to as his or her "ritual cycle."

Lyric: refers to the poetic quality of a song, usually created by its words or text, often expressing subjective thoughts and emotions through images; "lyric songs" are sometimes distinguished from "narrative songs" which tell a complete story; though a lyric song may be connected to a story, its text does not narrate the story.

Lyrics: the words or text of a song.

Melismatic: the quality of a song by which more than one note or pitch is sung to each syllable of the text (see syllabic). An example of melisma is the refrain of "Angels We Have Heard on High" in which the word "gloria" is sung to a long stream of pitches.

Melody: a succession of pitches and rhythms that produce a recognizable, distinctive, and prominent pattern of sound. When music is polyphonic, the melody is often the most outstanding line of music.

Membranophone: an instrument on which the primary vibrating device is a flexible, lateral material or membrane, such as a leather skin (on a drum) or a spider’s web (on a mirlaton).

Metaphor: a poetic or musical feature by which a word or sound ordinarily used to designate one thing is used to designate another, thereby making a connection between the two.

Meter: a measure of musical time that organizes beats into larger units; a cycle of beats, often with subdivisions and stresses on particular beats, which organizes rhythmic experience. For example, marches are often in duple (divisible by two) meters: 1-2, 1-2. Waltzes are usually in triple meters: 1-2-3, 1-2-3.

Mirlaton: a noise-making device on a instrument consisting of a membrane attached to the main resonator that produces a pronounced buzz along with the primary timbre of the instrument. African xylophones often have mirlatons on their resonators. A kazoo is an instrument whose primary timbre is created by a mirlaton.

Monophony: music consisting of a single line or melody (mono=one, phony=sound).

Motif: a pattern or recognizable series of notes, intervals, rhythmic figures, or other recurring thematic elements or characteristic designs; they are frequently short and stand out from the rest of the music.

Multipart: a characteristic of music in which different voices or sections of a group perform different musical patterns simultaneously (more than one part); polyphonic.

Music event: a term used by ethnomusicologists to designate the object of their research, including a performance and all the attendant elements of the context, such as audience behavior, dancers if any, relative roles of musicians, environmental factors, coincidental features, etc.

Narrative songs: songs, like ballads, with words that tell a story (often distinguished from "lyric songs").

Noise: a non-pitched sound or timbre that is common in nonwestern instruments. In many instruments, noise may accompany the primary timbre (a noisy tone) or may comprise the entire timbre. Many idiophones and most percussion instruments are entirely or largely noise, but noise is also produced on aerophones when the performer allows breath to escape the instrument, on chordaphones when the act of striking or bowing the string includes pronounced noise. Many instruments have extra noise-making devices attached to the instrument’s major vibrating material or its resonator.

Notation: a graphic or written representation of music sound. There are different systems of notation used in the US and throughout the world, one of which is "Western staff notation" (five lines and four spaces). It is often possible to discern the consciously important parts of music for a culture by the features it includes in its notation system.

Ornament/ornamentation: musical features such as trills, glissandos, bending, rhythmic flourishes, or "extra" notes that serve to complicate or embellish a primary line of music. In some genres, the ornamentation is as important as the music it decorates, so that audiences come to expect it as part of the genre.

Ostinato: a repeated, usually short, melodic or rhythmic pattern; a recognizable and defined phrase that is repeated, usually at the same pitch level, throughout the entire or some part of a piece.

Performance practice: the socially and aesthetically standardized ways of performing music in a given society.

Phrase: a subdivision of a piece of music somewhat similar to a clause or sentence in speech; usually it has an identifiable beginning and end and is recognized as a unit.

Pitch: in a general sense, synonymous with "note" or "tone". In a narrower sense, the relative position (high-low) of a note in a scale; the pitch is primarily dependent on the frequency of the waveform. Musical cultures and societies often give names to pitches (for instance, "middle C" or "do"; in some cultures, pitches are named according to members of a family – "father tone", "grandmother tone", "baby tone").

Pitch inventory: a list of all the pitches used in a piece.

Pitch range: the distance, from lowest to highest, of the pitches in a piece.

Polyphony: music with two or more independently horizontal, melodic parts sounding together (poly=many, phony = sounds). Compare to monophony and heterophony.

Polyrhythm: two or more simultaneous rhythms or metrical patterns.

Portamento: uninterrupted "slides" often at the ends of phrases. Portamentos are common on instruments where different pitches can be produced with a single device (e.g., the voice, stringed instruments, etc.).

Pulse: a term often loosely used to refer to an underlying rhythmic "beat" or meter.

Repertory, repertoire: the set or stock of songs/instrumental pieces that an individual or culture performs or is able to perform.

Resonator: the part of an instrument that amplifies the sound and shapes the instrument’s timbre or tone quality.

Scale: a set of pitches usually arranged in descending or ascending order. Scales are often classified by the number of notes they contain, as well as by the intervals between the notes. A "pentatonic" scale is a 5-note scale; "hexatonic" scale is a 6-note scale, "heptatonic", a 7-note scale.

Socialization: the process by which a member of a culture or society learns the values, outlooks, symbols, and techniques of that culture (also called "enculturation").

Strophic form: the structure of a piece of music that consists of different verses or stanzas that are sung to the same melody (the music basically stays the same while the lyrics change from stanza to stanza).

Syllabic: the quality of a song by which a single note or pitch is sung to each syllable of the text (see melismatic). An example of syllabic form is the primary verse (before the refrain) of "Angels We Have Heard on High" in which each word coincides with a single pitch.

Symbol: a sign that calls attention to something beyond itself; symbolic meanings and functions of music exist when music refers to other aspects of experience.

Syncretism: the result of combining features of two or more societies into one new form. Musical syncretism is the combination into a new form of features from two or more musical cultures or styles.

Tempo: the relative speed at which a piece of music is played.

Timbre: the particular quality of a sound that distinguishes it from other sounds of the same pitch and loudness; sometimes called "tone color" or "tone quality". For example, the timbre of a violin is the quality that makes it sound different from a flute if both instruments are playing the same note.

Unison: the quality by which several instruments or voices perform the same series of pitches together; sometimes also used to describe instruments or voices playing/singing the same pitch an octave apart.

Vibrating device: the part of an instrument that provides the initial vibration comprising its sound. A vibrating device or material can be air, strings, animal skins, etc. In the majority of (but not all) instruments, the vibration produced by the vibrating device passes into a resonator to be amplified and shaped timbrally.

Vibrato: an ornament consisting of a slight fluctuation or "quivering" on a pitch; a vibrato may be a larger or smaller, or more or less rapid variation on a sustained pitch.

Vocable: a sung syllable that has no linguistic meaning; non-lexical or "meaningless". When vocables are used extensively, the voice often takes on the quality of a non-vocal instrument.

Vocal quality: the timbre of a voice beyond the actual vowel or consonant being sung; the same word can be sung with various vocal qualities (e.g., in a "rough" voice, in a "growling" voice). Sometimes a genre of song calls for a specific vocal quality or style.