Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance

Musicae Scientiae, 13(2), 224-226

This book delivers what it promises: it is intended as an introductory textbook to the psychology of music with an emphasis on music cognition. The book contains 250 pages of text, text boxes, illustrations, and a comprehensive subject and author index, as well as audio examples which are available via the internet and iTunes. The strength of the book lies in the overall pedagogical thinking that pervades it. Professor Thompson, now in Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), starts each chapter with a clear learning objective and ends with apt suggestions for further reading. More importantly, the structure of the book does not adopt the usual bottom-up approach that starts with acoustics and the description of the auditory system. Instead it covers recent findings and controversial issues as a way to motivate the readers and make them aware of the " hot buttons " in music psychology (e.g. reductionism to neural processes, nativism, and the ecological validity of experiments). The style of writing is extremely clear and the scientific rationale behind each of the methodologies and research designs is lucidly explained. The book provides a balanced overview of the essential topics in music cognition. Not only are the main findings within each topic summarized, but advice is given about the pitfalls lurking within particular studies and explanations. Moreover, Thompson throws into question the causes of these phenomena and some ideas for further reading. For this reason only, Music, Thought, and Feeling provides also food for thought for readers already well-versed in music cognition. The expertise of the author is not only evident in the cogent way he summarizes the critical issues within the field but also in the sheer number of landmark studies that have been conducted by the author and his collaborators. These actually form the core part of the book and their range is truly diverse: from timing the perception of key changes (with Cuddy, 1997), through cross-cultural exploration of emotions and music (with Balkwill, 1999) to the integration of visual aspects of performance to the musical experience (with Graham & Russo, 2005). A total of 80 sound excerpts are available online that have been either created for this book or are shared by various researchers and musicians for this purpose. 29 complete music tracks are available via iTunes, where one can listen to the previews and purchase the songs separately. In sum, the sound examples are a particularly inspiring aspect of the book: They represent a variety of musical styles — from hiphop and rock classics to a group of Calabrian women singing to a child, as well as the usual Shepard and scale illusions — and all are explained in sufficient detail within the pages of the book. Online resources could have been utilized more

Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie [Journal of the German-Speaking Society of Music Theory], 2005

Musicae Scientiae, 2006

Background in the psychology of music The historical development of the psychology of music largely followed that of psychology in general. In the 20th century it adopted the research methods and interests of cognitive psychology and more recently has turned to new interdisciplinary connections with psychobiology and the neurosciences. There remains, however, a certain inadequacy regarding work in the psychology of music and cultural psychology and as well of interpretative research aimed at interpreting the role of music in those processes, processes Bruner called “the nature and cultural shaping of meaning-making, and the central place it plays in human action”. Background in historical musicology and cultural anthropology Historical musicology and cultural anthropology maintain that experiencing and understanding music represents a process fundamentally dependent upon cultural context. This begs the question as to how cultural context influences social and individual representati...

2014

The International Summer School on Musical Understanding (ISSMU) was held for three and half days, July 8 to 11, 2013, at the Department of Music of the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. Twenty-five postgraduate students from academic or research institutions from 15 countries participated in ISSMU. The authors (doctoral-level students at the University of Sheffield) initiated and organized ISSMU in association with the research center “Music Mind Machine in Sheffield.” Two academics from the University of Sheffield—Renee Timmers and Nicola Dibben—were academic advisers. The main focus of ISSMU was to investigate musical understanding from philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific perspectives within related methodological and theoretical frameworks. Both the academic advisors and the invited speakers—Corrado Sinigaglia (University of Milan, Department of Philosophy), Tuomas Eerola (University of Jyväskylä, Department of Music), and Katie Overy (University of Edinburgh, Department of Music)—gave presentations and organized workshops to stimulate discussion for group work sessions. In the group work, attendees designed an empirical experiment and presented their findings via oral presentations. In this report, we (i) state the aims and the objectives of ISSMU, (ii) describe its structure and organization, (iii) summarize the main outcomes, (iv) analyze attendees’ feedback, and (v) discuss possible future perspectives.

DEDiCA. Revista de Educação e Humanidades (dreh)

I was very honoured to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research (SEMPRE) in 2017, and this has given me a chance to reflect on the 40 years or so during which I have been working in these fields. Many changes have taken place over that time -nearly all for the better. I hope it will be of interest to readers to hear my personal story, in which I will chart -in a completely rambling and intuitive but loosely chronological fashion -some of the twists and turns in my career. Some of these have been influenced by changes in music psychology itself; some by career moves; and some because I ran into significant others at different points on the journey.

Journal of Music Theory, 1984

Timbre is a misleadingly simple and exceedingly vague word encompassing a very complex set of auditory attributes, as well as a plethora of intricate psychological and musical issues. It covers many parameters of perception that are not accounted for by pitch, loudness, spatial position, duration, or even by various environmental characteristics such as room reverberation. This leaves myriad possibilities, some of which have been explored during the past 40 years or so. We now understand timbre to have two broad characteristics that contribute to the perception of music: (1) it is a multitudinous set of perceptual attributes, some of which are continuously varying (e.g., attack sharpness, brightness, nasality, richness), others of which are discrete or categorical (e.g., the "blatt" at the beginning of a sforzando trombone sound or the pinched offset of a harpsichord sound), and (2) it is one of the primary perceptual vehicles for the recognition, identification, and tracking over time of a sound source (singer's voice, clarinet, set of carillon bells) and thus is involved in the absolute categorization of a sounding object

In this essay I approach the mysterious art of music from several perspectives. As a classical pianist, I think about music as an immensely powerful way of communication. As a music teacher, I am interested in explaining tangibles of music in the clearest terms possible. And as a scholar in the cognitive sciences, I believe that the psychology of music can advance our understanding of the human mind.

Contemporary Music Review, 1993

Frontiers in Psychology