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Music cognition is an interdisciplinary field involving such disparate areas as cognitive science, music theory, psychology, musicology, neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, psychoacoustics, etc. The field aspires to account for the underlying mental processes that occur when people listen to music or perform music. Image File history File links Information_icon. ... Cognitive science is usually defined as the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence (e. ... Music theory is a field of study that investigates the nature or mechanics of music. ... Psychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of mental processes and behavior. ... Musicology is reasoned discourse concerning music (Greek: μουσικη = music and λογος = word or reason). In other words: the whole body of systematized knowledge about music which results from the application of a scientific method of investigation or research, or of philosophical speculation and rational systematization to the facts, the processes and the... Drawing of the cells in the chicken cerebellum by S. Ramón y Cajal Neuroscience is a field that is devoted to the scientific study of the nervous system. ... Computer science, or computing science, is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems. ... For other uses, see Philosophy (disambiguation). ... Psychoacoustics is the study of subjective human perception of sounds. ... ...

Overview

Music cognition clearly came to be recognized as a discipline in the early 1980's, 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 (motives, phrases, sections, etc.)
• Rhythm and meter (perception and production)
• Key inference
• Expectation (including melodic expectation).
• Musical similarity
• Emotional response
• Expressive, musical performance

Some aspects of cognitive music theory describe how sound is perceived by a listener. While the study of human interpretations of sound is called psychoacoustics, the cognitive aspects of how listeners interpret sounds as musical events is commonly known as music cognition. In music, sound waves are usually measured not by length (or wavelength) or period, but by frequency. In music, a motif is a perceivable or salient reoccurring fragment or succession of notes that may used to construct the entirety or parts of complete melodies, themes. ... In music a phrase is a section of music that is relatively self contained and coherent over a medium time scale. ... For the popular Tamil film, see Rhythm (film) Rhythm (Greek = flow, or in Modern Greek, style) is the variation of the accentuation of sounds or other events over time. ... In music theory, the key identifies the tonic triad, the chord, major or minor, which represents the final point of rest for a piece, or the focal point of a section. ... Melodic expectation refers to the tendency for a person listening to a musical melody to have a feeling for what might come next in the melody. ... Emotional redirects here. ... This article is about compression waves. ... Psychoacoustics is the study of subjective human perception of sounds. ... The wavelength is the distance between repeating units of a wave pattern. ... Periodicity is the quality of occurring at regular intervals (e. ... Sine waves of various frequencies; the bottom waves have higher frequencies than those above. ...

Every object has a resonant frequency which is determined by the object's composition. The different frequencies at which the sound producers of many instruments vibrate are given by the harmonic series. The resonators of musical instruments are designed to exploit these frequencies. Different instruments have different timbres due to variation in the size and shape of the instrument as well as the choice of materials from which the parts of the instrument are constructed. // In physics, resonance is the tendency of a system to oscillate with high amplitude when excited by energy at a certain frequency. ... Sine waves of various frequencies; the bottom waves have higher frequencies than those above. ... Pitched musical instruments are usually based on a harmonic oscillator such as a string or a column of air. ... A musical instrument is a device constructed or modified with the purpose of making music. ... In music, timbre, also timber (from Fr. ...

A note is generally perceived as a sound on a single pitch. Notes have a regular wave beat on the eardrum that humans (and perhaps animals as well) find pleasing. This may be in part due to the fact that from the moment the hearing function becomes available to an unborn child, there is the regular rhythm of the mother's heartbeat.

Often the fundamental aspects of sound and music are described as pitch, duration, intensity, and timbre. Pitch is the perceived fundamental frequency of a sound. ... A duration is an amount of time or a particular time interval. ... The sound intensity, I, (acoustic intensity) is defined as the sound power Pac per unit area A. The usual context is the measurement of sound intensity in the air at a listeners location. ... In music, timbre, also timber (from Fr. ...

Pitch

Musical sounds are composed of pitch, duration, and timbre. Pitch is determined by the sound's frequency of vibration, such as A440, which vibrates at 440 Hz. Pitches may be related by interval, their relative distance from a reference pitch. Tuning is the process of assigning pitches to notes. The difference in pitch between two notes is called an interval. Notes, in turn, can be arranged into different scales and modes. The most common scales are major, harmonic minor, melodic minor, and pentatonic. Pitch is the perceived fundamental frequency of a sound. ... In music, timbre, also timber (from Fr. ... In music, there are two common meanings for tuning: Tuning practice The act of tuning an instrument or voice. ... The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ... In music, a scale is a set of musical notes that provides material for part or all of a musical work. ... In music, a mode is an ordered series of musical intervals, which, along with the key or tonic, define the pitches. ...

Future

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 psychophysics and music psychology. 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 revolution made scientists more aware of the role and importance of these aspects. While twenty years ago, music was hardly mentioned in any handbook of psychology (or appeared only in a subsection on pitch or rhythm perception), it is now recognized, along with vision and language, as an important and informative domain in which to study a variety of aspects of cognition, including expectation, emotion, perception, and memory. The role of music scholars and scientists in this 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 cognition as a whole. Psychophysics is the branch of cognitive psychology dealing with the relationship between physical stimuli and their perception. ... Please wikify (format) this article as suggested in the Guide to layout and the Manual of Style. ... The cognitive revolution is a name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that combined new thinking in psychology, anthropology and linguistics with the nascent fields of computer science and neuroscience. ...

References

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. (2006). "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession." New York: Dutton. ISBN 0-525-94969-0

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Intermediate Reading

• Dowling, W. Jay and Harwood, Dane L. (1986) Music Cognition. San Diego: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-221430-7.
• Krumhansl, Carol L. (2001) Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514836-3.
• Sloboda, John A. (1985) The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-852128-6.

Journal Articles

• Cross, Ian (1998). "Music Analysis and Music Perception." Music Analysis 17(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"

External links

• Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC)
• Music Cognition Group of the Society for Music Theory (SMT)
• Music Cognition at Northwestern University
• Music Cognition at the Ohio State University
• Music Cognition Group at University of Amsterdam
• Centre for Music and Science at University of Cambridge
• Music, Mind and Technology (MMT) at University of Jyväskylä (Finland)