Psychology

Although research in music psychology, education and therapy has expanded exponentially in the 21st century, there is something of a ‘black hole’ around which much of the discourse circles: music itself. While writers have largely been occupied with what people think about musical engagement, the little musical analysis that exists has tended to be at a low level compared to the sophisticated non-musical exploration that is present. This highlights the tenuous connection between musical enquiry in the context of the humanities and that occurring within the social sciences, the one exception being the partial intersection of music theory and psychology. Here, however, progress has largely been in one direction, with something of the objectivity that characterizes psychological research reading across to music analysis, and taking the form of what has been called ‘empirical musicology’. This book takes a further, reciprocal step, in which certain of the techniques of empirical musicology (in particular, the author’s ‘zygonic’ theory) are used to inform thinking in the domains of music-psychological, educational and therapeutic research. A new, interdisciplinary sphere of endeavour is sketched out, for which the term ‘applied musicology’ is coined. The book adopts a phenomenological, inductive approach, using the analysis of hundreds of real-life examples of musical engagement and interaction to build new theories of musical intentionality and influence, and to shed new light on our understanding of aspects of music perception and cognition. This book is intended to lay the foundations upon which a new category of interdisciplinary work will be built.

This book is a handbook of musical development from conception to late adolescence. Within twenty-four chapters it celebrates the richness and diversity of the many different ways in which children can engage in and interact with music. Arranged in five sections, the first section examines the critical months and years from conception to the end of infancy. It looks at how the musical brain develops, ways of understanding musical development, and the nature of musicality. Section two scrutinizes claims about the non-musical benefit of exposure to music, for example that music makes you smarter. Section three focuses on those issues that help explain and identify individual differences. It includes chapters examining how children develop their motivation to study music, and two chapters on children with special needs. Section four covers skills that can develop as a result of exposure to music. The final section of the book discusses five different contexts and includes: a chapter on historical perspectives providing information for making comparisons between how children have learned and developed their musical capacities in the past, with current opportunities; two additional chapters that focus on children's involvement in music in non-Western cultures; and two final chapters focusing on youth musical engagement and the transition from child to adult.

Music offers a unique opportunity to understand better the organization of the human brain. Like language, music exists in all human societies. Like language, music is a complex, rule-governed activity that seems specific to humans, and associated with a specific brain architecture. Yet unlike most other high-level functions of the human brain — and unlike language — music is a skill at which only a minority of people become proficient. The study of music as a major brain function has for some time been relatively neglected. Just recently, however, we have witnessed an explosion in research activities on music perception and performance and their correlates in the human brain. This volume brings together a collection of authorities — from the fields of music, neuroscience, psychology, and neurology — to describe the advances being made in understanding the complex relationship between music and the brain. It is a book that will lay the foundations for a cognitive neuroscience of music.

Recent studies in music education have investigated the ways in which different groups construe music and music education, and the ways in which these constructions are culturally bound. This book explores the ways in which the discipline of cultural psychology can contribute to our understanding of how music learning and development occurs in a range of cultural settings, and the subsequent implications of such understanding for the theory and practice of music education. The book opens with an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of a cultural psychology of music education. Ten music education scholars and researchers provide chapters that illustrate the application of this approach to key issues in music education; its theory and practice. These chapters provide opportunities to look more deeply into the practices of music education in order to understand the role culture plays in shaping children's musical learning and thinking, the learning and teaching of music teachers, the formal and informal institutions and structures within and through which learning and teaching occur, and, the intersection of these processes and structures in the development of musical thought and practice.

Since the publication in 1986 of the book The Musical Mind, music psychology has developed as a vibrant area of research, exerting influence on areas as diverse as music education and cognitive neuroscience. This new book brings together twenty-three chapters and reviews on music and the mind, focusing on ideas, interpretation, argument and application rather than on technical issues.

Whereas most of the literature in the psychology of music has focused on the processes involved when listening to music, little has been written about the processes involved in making music. This reissued book brings together figures in music psychology to present studies of the processes by which music is generated. The book looks at the generation of expression in musical performance, the problems of synchrony in ensemble performance, the development of children's song, rehearsal strategies of pianists, improvisational skill in trained and untrained musicians, children's spontaneous notations for music, formal constraints on compositional systems, and compositional strategies of music students.

Music's ability to express and arouse emotions is a mystery that has fascinated both experts and laymen at least since ancient Greece. This book offers an account of this domain. It provides coverage of the many approaches that may be said to define the field of music and emotion, in all its breadth and depth. The first section offers multi-disciplinary perspectives on musical emotions from philosophy, musicology, psychology, neurobiology, anthropology, and sociology. The second section features methodologically oriented chapters on the measurement of emotions via different channels (e.g., self-report, psychophysiology, neuroimaging). Sections three and four address how emotion enters into different aspects of musical behaviour, both the making of music and its consumption. Section five covers developmental, personality, and social factors. Section six describes the most important applications involving the relationship between music and emotion. In a final commentary, the editors comment on the history of the field, summarize the current state of affairs, and propose future directions for the field.

The ability to improvise represents one of the highest levels of musical achievement. An improviser must master a musical language to such a degree as to be able spontaneously to invent stylistically idiomatic compositions in the moment. This feat is one of the pinnacles of human creativity, and yet its cognitive basis is poorly understood. What musical knowledge is required for improvisation? How does a musician learn to improvise? What are the neural correlates of improvised performance? This book explores these questions through an interdisciplinary approach that draws on the study of pedagogical treatises on improvisation, interviews with improvisers, musical analysis of improvised performances, and cognitive neuroscience. Findings from the treatises, interviews, and analyses are discussed from the perspective of cognitive psychological theories of learning, memory, and expertise, as well as data from functional brain imaging studies of improvisation. Pedagogy, learning, and performance in improvisation are explored in a cross-cultural context, demonstrating universal features across a wide variety of musical traditions. Though disparate, these sources provide a convergent picture of the improvising mind, suggesting that musical improvisation draws on some of the very same cognitive processes and neural resources as the more mundane but equally infinitely creative faculties of language and movement. Improvisation therefore provides a new focus for comparisons of music and language cognition: while past research comparing music and language cognition has focused almost exclusively on perception of the two sound systems, the cognitive processes underlying the acquisition and production of music and language have not been systematically explored. Here, learning to improvise is compared with language acquisition, and improvised performance is compared with spontaneous speech from both theoretical and neurobiological perspectives.

The past fifteen years have witnessed an increasing interest in the comparative study of language and music as cognitive systems. Language and music are uniquely human traits, so it is not surprising that this interest spans practically all branches of cognitive science, including psychology, computer science, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and education. Underlying the study of language and music is the assumption that the comparison of these two domains can shed light on the structural and functional properties of each, while also serving as a test case for theories of how the mind and, ultimately, the brain work. This book presents an interdisciplinary study of language and music, bringing together a team of leading specialists across these fields. The volume is structured around four core areas in which the study of music and language has been particularly fruitful: structural comparisons, evolution, learning and processing, and neuroscience. As such it provides a snapshot of the different research strands that have focused on language and music, identifying current trends and methodologies that have been (or could be) applied to the study of both domains, and outlining future research directions.

Consciousness has been described as one of the most mysterious things in the universe. Scientists, philosophers, and commentators from a whole range of disciplines can't seem to agree what it is, or why it is that the whole rich panoply of human experience seems to emerge from a lump of squishy grey matter in our heads. Most agree, though, that consciousness represents a Hard Problem, and consciousness studies has emerged as a quasi-discipline over recent years, as a multidisciplinary discourse seeking to address these and other fascinating and perplexing questions. While the arts and humanities have joined the sciences at the debating table, music has been relatively under-represented-until now. This book redresses this balance. Its twenty chapters offer different takes on issues around music and consciousness, both addressing existing agendas, and introducing new ones. No single view emerges, but what the collection as a whole makes clear is that to understand consciousness we need to do much more than look at brains. Studying music makes it clear that consciousness is as much to do with minds, bodies, culture, and history. The book, which includes several chapters drawing from Eastern philosophies, also provides a corrective to any perception that the study of consciousness is a purely Western preoccupation. In addition to what it says about consciousness, the book also — and perhaps primarily — represents a new configuration of writings about music.