She is a scholar of the musical and religious cultures of South and Southeast Asia, the Islamic world and the Americas.
[1] Her early work was based on in-depth ethnography and on-site research of the Burmese harp (sang gauk) and Javanese gamelan; however, her later work challenged in-depth ethnography as the dominant research method in ethnomusicology, specifically by investigating the relationship between esoteric texts of Tantrism and Sufism with musical thinking and more recently through explorations of the intersections of neuroscience, music, and emotion.
[4] These studies, which were informed by ethnography as well as other research methods, were the basis for Becker's books Gamelan Stories (1993) and Deep Listeners (2004).
Becker's latest work, bringing perspectives from empirical studies of the brain and perception to the study of musical perception and emotion, focused on "trying to create bridges, between the two disciplines, and different ways of understanding musical experience.
"[6] Becker received the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2005 for her book, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing.