A cultural area is a region (area) with one relatively homogenous human activity or complex of activities (culture). These areas are geographical rather than historical, and while they are used to determine historical trends, they are not considered equivalent as in Kulturkreis .

A music area is a cultural area defined according to musical activity, and may or may not conflict with the cultural areas assigned to a given region. Bruno Nettl (p. 142-143) divides the world into three large music areas, each containing a "cultivated" or classical musics "that are obviously its most complex musical forms," with, nearby, folk styles which interact with the cultivated, and, on the perimiter, primitive styles:

• Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa
  • based on shared isometric materials, diatonic scales, and polyphony based on paralell thirds, fourths, and fifths.
• North Africa, Southwest Asia, South Asia, and Indonesia.
  • based on shared small intervals in scales, melodies, and polyphony.
• American Indian, East Asia, Northern Siberian, and Finno-Ugric music
  • based on shared large steps in pentatonic and tetratonic scales.

However, then then adds that "the world-wide development of music must have been a unified process in which all peoples participated," and that one finds similar tuens and traits in puzzlingly isolated or separated locations throughout the world.

Source

• Nettl, Bruno (1956). Music in Primitive Culture. Harvard University Press.