Book Review: The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the past and imagining the future / Edited by Elizabeth H. Margulis, Psyche Loui, and Deirdre Loughridge. 2023, MIT Press, 387 pages.

The Science-Music Borderlands is a new critical contribution to the field of interdisciplinary music research, promising intellectual synthesis of cutting-edge music research that has been enabled by the convening power of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC). Served primarily by North American constituencies, this international organisation represents the intellectual and professional interests of an international music science community. While the majority of contributors are affiliated with Universities and elite research institutions in the USA (18) and Canada (6), the volume editors (Northeastern University and Princeton, USA) have involved numerous contributions from Europe and the UK (11) and East Asia (4); institutional affiliations also feature from India, Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria and Republic of South Africa. The geographical range is important, for reasons that the editors themselves foreground: that “despite the unique opportunities for confluence afforded by the more than century-long existence of humanistic and scientific inquiry into music, and despite the potential offered by the decades-long existence of a society [SMPC] that strives to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, rifts between the approaches persist… [yet] researchers have been steadily working toward new paradigms informed by developments across disciplinary boundaries and the global conditions of the twenty-first century.” (p.2). The institutional and global conditions in which music research takes place matter a great deal. The influence of politics and policy at such wider levels facilitates - and constrains – both the knowledge conditions and the practical opportunities that are available to access music’s multi-disciplinary expressions.