The anthropological foundations of musical aesthetics are socially and culturally constituted; historically they take consistently different form: the aesthetic relationship between receiving subjects and musical objects or processes (performances, works, media) is always bound up in social and cultural contexts. Musical-aesthetic categories are formed, mediated, handed down, and altered in the framework of cultural processes.
This research area thus examines the question of the extent to which the evident diversity of musical-cultural and socio-musical environments — the interplay of musical objects, processes, practices, and institutions — also influences variation in the musical-aesthetic formation of categories and judgments.
This work is undertaken with methods from the humanities (sociology, social/cultural anthropology, cultural studies, philology, and history) but also by drawing on the empirical methods of psychology and neuroscience.
We lay special emphasis on the development of empirical culturally and socially comparative research perspectives, hence on the systematic integration of non-European/non-Western musical forms into our empirical research. Contemporary empirical experiment-based theories of musical perception and aesthetics will here be examined in respect to their broad social and cultural scope and generalizability, and appropriate modifications made—for example by introducing experimental paradigms from psychology into the research field of musical ethnology.