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Music cognition is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the mental processes that support musical behaviors, including perception, comprehension, memory, attention, and performance. Originally arising in fields of psychoacoustics and sensation, cognitive theories of how people understand music more recently encompass neuroscience, music theory, music therapy, computer science, philosophy, and linguistics.

History
Music cognition clearly came to be recognized as a discipline in the early 1980s, 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, affective, or arousal response
 * Expressive, musical performance
 * Conceptual processing

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 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.

Looking back briefly, twenty years ago music went either completely unmentioned in psychology handbooks or appeared only in a subsection on pitch or rhythm perception. Today it is recognized, along with vision and language, as an important and informative domain in which to study the various aspects of cognition which activate psychic processes, including expectation, emotion, perception and memory, and how they apply to therapy. The role of music scholars and scientists in this latter 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 music just as much as more traditional analytic frameworks.

Research has been conducted into the pathways of emotional perception in the brain in response to music and vocal expression. It has been found that such pathways are inherently similar in that they accurately convey specific emotions, and that certain acoustic cues are specific to certain emotions.

Rhythm and Beat
Rhythm and beat are aspects of perception, not the sound from which they are derived. Researchers in rhythm perception, therefore, seek to discover the neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow certain sounds to be perceived as periodic or to be endowed with accent structure, as well as the particular attributes of those sounds that confer this perception. It is also of interest what the pulse of a given sound sequence is perceived to be. While the pulse is often related to the temporal regularities in the sound, it is not obvious from the sound itself which regularities will be used as cues in pulse perception. The question of pulse perception is also intimately tied to entrainment in general: The synchronization of organisms to external rhythms. When a human (or nonhuman animal ) entrains to an external rhythm, it does so at a particular frequency. Since there is a theoretically infinite number of frequencies in even the simplest isochronous rhythm (usually comprised by the harmonics and subharmonics of the reciprocal of the period), it is the question of music cognition scientists which frequency is chosen by the organism as the entrainment frequency, and what the neural and cognitive mechanisms are that lead to this choice.

Tonality
In music cognition, the study of tonality refers to perceived structural relationships between musical pitches, either due to harmony or melody or a combination of both. These relationships are achieved through such musical structures as cadence, chord progression, accent, and relations within or between keys. However, these are music-theoretic concepts rooted in the analysis of musical compositions, and do not necessarily apply to cognition and perception. One goal of music cognition is the establishment, or refutation, of these concepts as psychological or physiological reality. This is done, from the perspective of cognitive psychology, by creating computational or informational models which logically relate stimuli to responses. From the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, this is done by finding neural correlates of stimuli and stimulus-response pairings.

Seminal early work done by UC-San Diego researcher Diana Deutsch was among the first to explore the psychological attributes of auditory stimuli from a musical perspective. Her work in the 1970's focused heavily on the memory of auditory sequences depending on their relationships to musical structure. In general, she and others have found that memory for sound sequences is facilitated by adhering to simple principles common in music theory, such as octave equivalence and harmonic intervals, but not obvious from purely physical interpretations of the stimuli. She is also widely known for her research into musical and auditory illusions, such as the scale illusion, the octave illusion, and the tritone paradox. She later edited and co-authored one of the most important and frequently-cited books, and one of the few reference works, in music cognition, "The Psychology of Music", as of 2012 in its third edition.

Cornell University researcher Carol Krumhansl also contributed to understanding music-theoretic concepts in a psychological framework. Her work expanded this idea by showing that simple constructs, such as the stability of the tonic pitch and instability of accidentals relative to a tonal context, could be psychologically verified using psychometric scaling. This was similarly verified using chords as stimuli. Her methodology, deemed the probe-tone technique, is similar to other techniques used in psychophysics; subjects must rate a comparison stimulus for its goodness-of-fit, on a scale from 1 to 7, with a context previously heard. While Krumhansl and others attribute this effect to statistical regularities, it has also been advanced that it may be due to the recency effect or simple mathematical relationships (e.g., small integer ratios) between the contents of the comparison and standard stimuli.

Related fields

 * Cognitive musicology
 * Cognitive neuroscience of music
 * Psychology of music
 * Psychoacoustics

Topics

 * Embodied music cognition
 * Culture in music cognition
 * Music therapy

Encyclopedia entries

 * Palmer, Caroline/Melissa K. Jungers (2003): Music Cognition. In: Lynn Nadel: Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Vol. 3, London: Nature Publishing Group, pp. 155–158.

Introductory reading

 * Patel, Anirrudh D. (2010). Music, language, and the brain. New York: Oxford University Press.
 * 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 (2011). "Musical Cognition. A Science of Listening." New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4128-4228-0.
 * Levitin, Daniel J. (2006). "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession."  New York: Dutton. ISBN 0-525-94969-0
 * Purwins & Hardoon (2009). "Trends and Perspectives in Music Cognition Research and Technology."   Connection Science. 21(2-3), 85-88.
 * Snyder, Bob (2000). "Music and Memory: an introduction" The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-69237-6.

Intermediate reading

 * Deutsch, D. (Ed.) (1999). The Psychology of Music, 2nd Edition.San Diego: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-213565-2.
 * Dowling, W. Jay and Harwood, Dane L. (1986). Music Cognition. San Diego: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-221430-7.
 * Hallam, Cross, & Thaut, (eds.) (2008). The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 * Krumhansl, Carol L. (2001). Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514836-3.
 * Parncutt, Richard (1989). Harmony: A Psychoacoustical Approach. Berlin: Springer.
 * Sloboda, John A. (1985). The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-852128-6.
 * Lerdahl, F., and Jackendoff, R. (1996) A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-62107-6.
 * Temperley, D. (2004). The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-70105-1.
 * Thompson, W. F. (2009). Music, Thought, and Feeling: Understanding the Psychology of Music New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-537707-1.
 * Zbikowski, Lawrence M. (2004). Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. Oxford University Press, USA. ISBN 978-0-19-514023-1.
 * North, A.C. & Hargreaves, D.J. (2008). The Social and Applied Psychology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-856742-4.

Journal articles

 * Cross, Ian (1998). "Music Analysis and Music Perception." Music Analysis 17(1).
 * Gur, Golan (2008). "Body, Forces, and Paths: Metaphor and Embodiment in Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Conceptualization of Tonal Space" Music Theory Online 14(1).
 * Honing, Henkjan (2006). "Computational modeling of music cognition: A case study on model selection." Music Perception 23(5), 365–376.
 * Honing, Henkjan (2012). "Without it no music: Beat induction as a fundamental musical trait." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1252, 85–91.
 * Huron, David (1999). "Music and Mind: The foundation of cognitive musicology (The 1999 Ernst Bloch Lectures)" "Berkeley, University of California Press"
 * Purwins, Herrera, Grachten, Hazan, Marxer, Serra (2008). Computational Models of Music Perception and Cognition (Part I, Part II) Physics of Life Reviews 5(3), 151-182.
 * PDF Document