Theoretical and Practical Aspects of Cross-Cultural Corpus Studies

Abstract Corpus-based research has historically consisted primarily of data that can best be represented in Western musical notation, often with an American/Eurocentric bias. In this chapter, the authors present a corpus of live performances of jembe-drum ensemble music from Mali and two analytical studies that make use of it. These studies help us to understand and appreciate a musical style of considerable rhythmic subtlety and complexity, and, because they shed additional light on issues of rhythm perception and performance, they also increase the cultural diversity of empirical musicological research. The authors’ findings demonstrate the usefulness of a cross-cultural perspective for both general, scientifically informed theories of rhythm and meter and for ethnomusicologically informed theories of rhythm and meter in African (sub-Saharan) music-cultural contexts.