The purpose of this book is to create a better understanding of the anthropological aspects of music, defining ethnomusicology as not the study of the music of non-western cultures, but instead as the study of the relationship which music bears to society. Merriam claims the goals of ethnomusicology cannot be realized by considering music to be an object separate from the humans which make it, and therefore argues for the sake of an anthropology of music. Studying just the music as an object, Merriam argues, is counterintuitive to the goals of ethnomusicology, excluding a very important aspect of ethnomusicology, which is music's intrinsic ties to the ways humans act. Articulating this relationship, Merriam states,
