Paradigm design in cross-cultural research should abandon the assumption that Western-developed tasks measure universal capacities. Before comparing populations, researchers should always validate that tasks are ecologically meaningful within each culture. A beat-tapping task presupposes that "the beat" is a salient and unitary concept, but this may very well not hold for musical traditions organized around timeline patterns, cyclic gong punctuation, or non-isochronous subdivisions. Validation should involve collaboration with culture-bearers to determine whether task demands map onto indigenous musical concepts, and pilot testing to ensure that cross-cultural differences reflect genuine processing differences rather than differential task comprehension. This is a substantive theoretical commitment: if we cannot design culture-fair paradigms, this itself suggests that temporal cognition is more deeply culturally constituted than modulation accounts assume.
The stakes of this debate extend well beyond academic theory. If constitution holds, several domains of practice require revision. Clinical assessment of timing-related deficits, in conditions such as Parkinson's disease, ADHD, dyslexia, and autismm relies on normative data derived predominantly from Western populations. If temporal processing is partially constituted by cultural experience, individuals from non-Western backgrounds may be misdiagnosed as impaired when they are simply different. A Malian child whose implicit timing signatures diverge from Western norms is not necessarily deficient; they may have developed a different but equally functional temporal architecture. Culturally sensitive clinical practice would require developing population-specific norms and distinguishing genuine impairment from culturally-constituted variation.
Music education similarly assumes a universal developmental trajectory that students progress along at different rates. If constitution is correct, students from non-Western musical backgrounds may not be "behind" on a universal path but rather operating within a different temporal framework altogether. Effective pedagogy would need to identify what students bring from their developmental exposure rather than treating all students as starting from the same baseline. This has implications for assessment, curriculum design, and teacher training.
Moreover, AI music systems, from recommendation algorithms, generative models, automatic transcription, are trained predominantly on Western corpora and encode Western assumptions about metric structure, beat hierarchy, and tempo. These systems will systematically fail users whose musical cognition is organized differently, producing recommendations that feel wrong, transcriptions that miss the point, and generated music that sounds foreign. As AI music tools become more prevalent, their cultural bias becomes a form of technological marginalization. Resolving the constitution/modulation question would inform whether such systems can be "fixed" through broader training data (modulation logic) or require fundamentally different architectures for different user populations (constitution logic).
Resolving this question is therefore urgent for clinical practice, education, and technology design.