He did field work every year from 1971 to 1991, accompanied by ethnolinguists and students, to record this music to study it and preserve it.

Arom was awarded a First Prize for French Horn at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique of Paris before becoming an ethnomusicologist.

From a mostly descriptive discipline, he has tried to build a science in the full sense of the word, with all of its attributes: experimentation, verification, validation, modeling, conceptualization and reconstitution by means of synthesis.

He has been a visiting professor at many universities – particularly Montreal, UCLA, Vancouver, M.I.T., Cambridge (U.K.), Tel-Aviv, Bar-Ilan, Haifa, Basel, Zurich, Siena, and Venice, and his work has inspired contemporary composers such as Luciano Berio (Coro), György Ligeti, Steve Reich, Fabien Lévy and Fabian Panisello.

Arom is Research Director Emeritus at the CNRS, a founding member of the Société française d'ethnomusicologie, the Société française d'analyse musicale, the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM) and the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology; he is also a member of the Société française de musicologie and the Board of directors of The Universe of Music project (UNESCO).