A cross-cultural exploration of music in history: language, health and art implications

Music lives in every culture, yet most investigations into music are based on Western music and Western listeners. This has not only ignored the cultural richness in music itself, neglected the internationalization characteristics of music creators, listeners and resources, but has also limited the impact of research on large varieties of societies. In reality, music is multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-facet. Evident in communication, education and healthcare systems, multi-cultural challenges have also merged into many aspects of our historical and contemporary societies. Moreover, the rapid changes of the community and fast evolutionary development of media and technology have enriched the wealth of music. Consequently, in this paper, we demonstrate that music has a rich but cross-cultural foundation in history with significance in linguistics, health and art.