Music cognition is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the mental processes that support musical behaviors, including
perceptionIn philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. It is a task far more complex than was imagined in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was predicted that building perceiving machines would take about a decade,...
, comprehension, memory, attention, and performance. Originally arising in fields of
psychoacousticsPsychoacoustics is the study of subjective human perception of sounds. Alternatively it can be described as the study of the psychological correlates of the physical parameters of acoustics.- Background :...
and sensation, cognitive theories of how people understand music more recently encompass
neuroscienceNeuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Such studies span the structure, function, evolutionary history, development, genetics, biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology, informatics, computational neuroscience and pathology of the nervous system.The International Brain Research...
,
music theoryMusic theory is the field of study that deals with how music works. It examines the language and notation of music. It identifies patterns that govern composers' techniques. In a grand sense, music theory distills and analyzes the parameters or elements of music – rhythm, harmony , melody,...
,
music therapyMusic therapy is an interpersonal process in which a trained music therapist uses music and all of its facets—physical, emotional, mental, social, aesthetic, and spiritual—to help clients to improve or maintain their health...
,
computer scienceComputer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems. It is frequently described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that create, describe and transform...
,
philosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
, and
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
.
Music cognition clearly came to be recognized as a discipline in the early 1980s, with the creation of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, and the journal
Music Perception. The field of music cognition focuses on how the mind makes sense of music as it is heard.
Music cognition is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the mental processes that support musical behaviors, including
perceptionIn philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. It is a task far more complex than was imagined in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was predicted that building perceiving machines would take about a decade,...
, comprehension, memory, attention, and performance. Originally arising in fields of
psychoacousticsPsychoacoustics is the study of subjective human perception of sounds. Alternatively it can be described as the study of the psychological correlates of the physical parameters of acoustics.- Background :...
and sensation, cognitive theories of how people understand music more recently encompass
neuroscienceNeuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Such studies span the structure, function, evolutionary history, development, genetics, biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology, informatics, computational neuroscience and pathology of the nervous system.The International Brain Research...
,
music theoryMusic theory is the field of study that deals with how music works. It examines the language and notation of music. It identifies patterns that govern composers' techniques. In a grand sense, music theory distills and analyzes the parameters or elements of music – rhythm, harmony , melody,...
,
music therapyMusic therapy is an interpersonal process in which a trained music therapist uses music and all of its facets—physical, emotional, mental, social, aesthetic, and spiritual—to help clients to improve or maintain their health...
,
computer scienceComputer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems. It is frequently described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that create, describe and transform...
,
philosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
, and
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
.
History
Music cognition clearly came to be recognized as a discipline in the early 1980s, with the creation of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, and the journal
Music Perception. The field of music cognition focuses on how the mind makes sense of music as it is heard. It also deals with the related question of the cognitive processes involved when musicians perform music. Like language, music is a uniquely human capacity that arguably played a central role in the origins of human cognition. The ways in which music can illuminate fundamental issues in cognition have been underexamined, or even dismissed as epiphenomenal. However, cognition in music is more and more acknowledged as fundamental to our understanding of cognition as a whole, hence music cognition should be able to contribute both conceptually and methodologically to cognitive science. Topics in the field include the following and others:
- A listener's perception of grouping structure (motive
In music, a motif or motive is a short musical idea, a salient recurring figure, musical fragment or succession of notes that has some special importance in or is characteristic of a composition...
s, phraseA musical phrase is a unit of musical meter that has a complete musical sense of its own, built from figures, motifs, and cells and combining to form melodies, periods and larger sections. or the length in which a singer or instrumentalist can play in one breath.The term, like sentence, verse etc...
s, sections, etc.)
- Rhythm
Rhythm is the variation of the length and accentuation of a series of sounds or other events.-Rhythm in linguistics:...
and meter (perception and production)
- Key
In music theory, the term key is used in many different and sometimes contradictory ways. A common use is to speak of music as being "in" a certain key, such as in the key of C or in the key of F-sharp. Sometimes the terms "major" or "minor" are appended, as in the key of A minor or in the key of...
inference
- Expectation (including melodic expectation
In music cognition melodic expectation is the tendency for a person listening to a melody to have a feeling or expectation for what might come next in the melody...
).
- Musical similarity
- Emotion
An emotion is a mental and physiological state associated with a wide variety of feelings, thoughts, and behavior. Emotions are subjective experiences, often associated with mood, temperament, personality, and disposition. The English word 'emotion' is derived from the French word émouvoir...
al, affective, or arousal response
- Expressive, musical performance
Some aspects of cognitive music theory describe how
soundSound is a travelling wave which is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations.- Perception of sound...
is perceived by a listener. While the study of human interpretations of sound is called
psychoacousticsPsychoacoustics is the study of subjective human perception of sounds. Alternatively it can be described as the study of the psychological correlates of the physical parameters of acoustics.- Background :...
, the cognitive aspects of how listeners interpret sounds as musical events is commonly known as music cognition.
In the 1970s, music was studied in the sciences mainly for its acoustical and perceptual properties, in what were then relatively novel disciplines such as
psychophysicsPsychophysics is a discipline within psychology that investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and their subjective correlates, or percepts...
and
music psychologyMusic psychology, or the psychology of music, may be regarded either as a branch of psychology or as a branch of musicology. It aims to explain and understand musical behavior and musical experience...
. Music scholars criticized much of this research for focusing too much on low-level issues of sensation and perception, often using impoverished stimuli (e.g., small rhythmic fragments) or music restricted to the Western classical repertoire, as well as a general unawareness of the role of music in its wider social and cultural context. However, the
cognitive revolutionThe cognitive revolution is the name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that began what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences.It began in the modern context of greater interdisciplinary communication and research...
made scientists more aware of the role and importance of these aspects.
Looking back briefly, twenty years ago music went either completely unmentioned in psychology handbooks or appeared only in a subsection on pitch or rhythm perception. Today it is recognized, along with vision and language, as an important and informative domain in which to study the various aspects of cognition which activate psychic processes, including expectation, emotion, perception and memory, and how they apply to therapy. The role of music scholars and scientists in this latter research seems to be greater than ever. It could well be that music cognition will evolve into a prominent discipline contributing to our understanding of controlling or managing life as a whole.
Introductory reading
- Day, Kingsley (October 21, 2004). "Music and the Mind: Turning the Cognition Key". Observer online.
- Jourdain, Robert (1997). Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination. New York: William Morrow and Company. ISBN 0-688-14236-2.
- Honing, Henkjan (2006). "On the growing role of observation, formalization and experimental method in musicology." Empirical Musicological Review] 1(1) 2–5.
- Levitin, Daniel J.
Professor Daniel J. Levitin, Ph.D. is an American cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, record producer, musician, and writer...
(2006). "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession." New York: Dutton. ISBN 0-525-94969-0
- Purwins & Hardoon (2009). "Trends and Perspectives in Music Cognition Research and Technology." Connection Science. 21(2-3), 85-88.
- Snyder, Bob (2000). "Music and Memory: an introduction" The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-69237-6.
Intermediate reading
- Deutsch, D. (Ed.) (1999). The Psychology of Music, 2nd Edition.San Diego: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-213565-2.
- Dowling, W. Jay and Harwood, Dane L. (1986). Music Cognition. San Diego: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-221430-7.
- Hallam, Cross, & Thaut, (eds.) (2008). The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Krumhansl, Carol L. (2001). Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514836-3.
- Parncutt, Richard (1989). Harmony: A Psychoacoustical Approach. Berlin: Springer.
- Sloboda, John A. (1985). The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-852128-6.
- Lerdahl, F., and Jackendoff, R. (1996) A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262621076.
- Temperley, D. (2004). The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262701051.
- Thompson, W. F. (2008). Music, Thought, and Feeling: Understanding the Psychology of Music. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195377071.
- Zbikowski, Lawrence M. (2004). Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. Oxford University Press, USA. ISBN 978-0195140231.
- North, A.C. & Hargreaves, D.J. (2008). The Social and Applied Psychology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198567424.
Journal articles
- Cross, Ian (1998). "Music Analysis and Music Perception." Music Analysis 17(1).
- Gur, Golan (2008). "Body, Forces, and Paths: Metaphor and Embodiment in Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Conceptualization of Tonal Space" Music Theory Online 14(1).
- Honing, Henkjan (2006). "Computational modeling of music cognition: A case study on model selection." Music Perception 23(5), 365–376.
- Huron, David (1999). "Music and Mind: The foundation of cognitive musicology (The 1999 Ernst Bloch Lectures)" "Berkeley, University of California Press" "1999"
- Purwins, Herrera, Grachten, Hazan, Marxer, Serra (2008). Computational Models of Music Perception and Cognition (Part I, Part II) Physics of Life Reviews 5(3), 151-182.
External links