Music Psychology

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.