 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,

Ethnomusicology, Merriam posits, “has most often been made in terms of what [musicology] encompasses,” being that the realms of musicology and ethnomusicology are exclusive to one another, and ethnomusicology has simply been relayed as being what musicology is not.Moving towards a clearer definition of ethnomusicology, Merriam writes that ethnomusicology “makes its unique contribution in welding together aspects of the social sciences and aspects of the humanities in such a way that each complements the other and leads to a fuller understanding of both.