Psychology of Music

This book considers the aims and impact of formative musical experiences, evaluating the extent to which music education of various kinds provides a foundation for lifelong involvement and interest in music. The discussion draws upon rich qualitative data, in which over 100 adults with an active interest in music reflect upon the influences and opportunities that shaped their musical life histories. The book addresses the relationship between the claims made for music education, the practice and policy through which those aims are filtered, and recollections of the lived experiences of learning music in a variety of contexts. This consideration of school music is set in the broader context of learning in the home and community, and illustrates the circumscribed yet immensely powerful role that music teachers and other potential role models can play in nurturing open-minded, active musicians. The four central chapters focus on generational change in home and school experiences of music; the locations in which musical learning takes place, including a cross-cultural comparison with respondents from Italy; the characteristics of teachers, parents and others as musical mentors and role models; and the lifelong outcomes of musical engagement for performers, teachers, listeners and adult learners. This analysis is then used to illuminate the claims made for music education in historical and contemporary debate, and to propose ways in which school music might better prepare young people for lifelong engagement in music. The book takes a long-term perspective on how formative musical experiences and opportunities have a lifelong impact on musical values, skills and attitudes.

This book draws upon his extensive experience to investigate an interventional approach to music making outside of formal teaching and learning situations. Working with historical, ethnographic, and theoretical research, the book provides a rich resource for those whom practice, advocate, teach, or study community music, music education, music therapy, ethnomusicology, and community cultural development.

This book develops a theory of musical meter based on psychological research in temporal perception, cognition, and motor behavior. Meter is regarded as a kind of entrainment, a synchronization of attention and actions to the rhythms of the environment. Drawing on research on the ability to make durational discriminations and categorizations at various tempos, as well as evidence from neurobiology, the “speed limits” for meter are given: the inter-onset interval for metric elements must be greater than 100ms (10 per second) and less than 1.5-2.00 seconds. Care is taken to distinguish rhythms or patterns of duration from meters, the listener/performer's complex patterns of expectation and attention. It is thus shown that metric behaviors are highly tempo-dependent. Ambiguities may arise when a rhythmic pattern may be regarded under more than one meter, and conflicts may arise when a pattern of durations contradicts the ongoing meter. The music-theoretical core of the book is its development of a set of metric well-formedness constraints, which limit the temporal range and organization of patterns of metric entrainment. A consideration of the rhythmic practices of various non-western cultures, including some African and Indian music, leads to an additional well-formedness constraint, that of maximal evenness. This allows for meters that involve uneven (i.e., non-isochronous) beats or beat subdivisions. The book concludes with the many meters hypothesis, which proposes that a large number of expressively timed temporal templates are acquired that are readily used when listening in familiar musical contexts.

Answering fundamental questions about musical preference, ability, and communication, the field of Musical Cognition and Development is critical to the understanding of how music is processed, grasped, and learned. This book covers the latest theoretical and practical techniques that explain meaning and understanding in music. Chapters offer cogent and concise insights giving up-to-date information and references. The book covers the most important topics in this field, including skill development in music performance, research on communicating music expressiveness, the neurobiology of music, the cognitive constraints in the listening process, and music and medicine as applied to neuroscience.

This book contains a collection of essays by nineteen internationally recognized scholars in music education. The writers speak for those in the profession who believe that critical thinking, constructive debate, and dialogues are the lifeblood of music education. By means of their essays, they also speak for those who believe that future music teachers must learn to think for themselves and develop their own philosophies based on their own careful reflections. One of the goals of the book is to provide the field of music education with good models of constructive criticism and mutually enlightening dialogues on basic issues in music education. The unifying element in this collection is praxialism as it relates to the many complex concepts and issues that constitute the nature and significance of music education. Each contributor offers critical reflections on a key topic in contemporary music education. The praxial philosophy of music education argues for a socially and artistically grounded concept of music and music education, challenging the field's traditional “absolutist” foundations. Among the themes discussed are multiculturalism in music education, the nature of musical understanding, early childhood education, the nature and teaching of music listening, music curriculum development, and musical creativity. Praxial music education is a living theory.

This book provides a concise, accessible, and up-to-date introduction to psychological research for musicians, performers, music educators, and studio teachers. Designed to address the needs and priorities of the performing musician rather than the research community, it reviews the relevant psychological research findings in relation to situations and issues faced by musicians, and draws out practical implications for the practice of teaching and performance. Rather than a list of dos and don'ts, the book equips musicians with an understanding of the basic psychological principles that underlie music performance, enabling each reader to apply the content flexibly to the task at hand. Following a brief review of the scientific method as a way of thinking about the issues and problems in music, the text addresses the nature–nurture problem, identification and assessment of musical aptitude, musical development, adult skill maintenance, technical and expressive skills, practice, interpretation and expressivity, sight-reading, memorization, creativity, and composition, performance anxiety, critical listening, and teaching and learning. While there is a large body of empirical research regarding music, most musicians lack the scientific training to interpret these studies. This text bridges this gap by relating these skills to the musician's experiences, addressing their needs directly with non-technical language and practical application. It includes multiple illustrations, brief music examples, cases, questions, and suggestions for further reading.

Music educators and practicing musicians have failed to benefit as much as they could from the past two decades of music psychology research. In this book, the authors propose to improve the situation by describing new approaches, informed by recent psychological research, to teaching music, learning music, and making music at all educational levels. Each chapter represents the collaboration between a music psychologist and a music educator. The articles begin by outlining music-psychological issues that are probably unfamiliar to musicians and music educators. Then, they propose teaching strategies and materials inspired by the psychologists' findings. The book's twenty-one articles cover the broad issues of “the developing musician”, “subskills of musical performance”, and “instruments and ensembles”.

Theories of musical meaning and psychological research on music have tended to treat music as a special domain, removed from the practical realities of everyday life. This book takes a different approach, tackling musical meaning from the perspective of perception, and treating meaning in terms of listeners' experiences and responses, rather than in abstractly philosophical terms. Using an eclectic mix of musical examples, it discusses the relationship between music and everyday sounds, music and motion, music and subjectivity, and the experience of music as a virtual environment. It starts from the premise that there is a significant overlap between our auditory experience of music and the primarily practical function of auditory perception in the lives of human beings. Framed by the ideas of ecological theory, the book emphasizes the importance of understanding perception as the relationship between perceivers and their environments, as a reciprocal relationship between perception and action, and in terms of the ways in which sounds specify events. Sitting at the intersection of music psychology, analysis, and critical musicology, the book presents an appraisal of cognitive and ecological accounts of perception as well as detailed analytical discussions of musical examples.