Psychology of Music

From Sound to Significance

Siu-Lan Tan, Peter Pfordresher, Rom Harré

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317299769
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie cognitive et cognition

In Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance (2nd edition), the authors consider music on a broad scale, from its beginning as an acoustical signal to its different manifestations across cultures. In their second edition, the authors apply the same richness of depth and scope that was a hallmark of the first edition of this text. In addition, having laid out the topography of the field in the original book, the second edition puts greater emphasis on linking academic learning to real-world contexts, and on including compelling topics that appeal to students' natural curiosity. Chapters have been updated with approximately 500 new citations to reflect advances in the field.

The organization of the book remains the same as the first edition, while chapters have been updated and often expanded with new topics. 'Part I: Foundations' explores the acoustics of sound, the auditory system, and responses to music in the brain. 'Part II: The Perception and Cognition of Music' focuses on how we process pitch, melody, meter, rhythm, and musical structure. 'Part III: Development, Learning, and Performance' describes how musical capacities and skills unfold, beginning before birth and extending to the advanced and expert musician. And finally, 'Part IV: The Meaning and Significance of Music' explores social, emotional, philosophical and cultural dimensions of music and meaning.

This book will be invaluable to undergraduates and postgraduate students in psychology and music, and will appeal to anyone who is interested in the vital and expanding field of psychology of music.

1 The scope of psychology of music

People everywhere and at all times for which we have records have picked out certain patterns of sound for particular attention. Some of these patterns are the stuff of what we call ‘music.’ What are the characteristics of the sound patterns we recognize as music? Why is it that these sound patterns have had a special significance for human beings?

All perceptible sounds begin with a propagation of energy into the environment. It may be a light breeze setting into motion a thousand fluttering leaves, the plucking of the strings of a harp, or the striking of a bass drum. What makes the particular dance of air molecules ‘musical’ in some instances, while other disturbances of air molecules seem to give rise to mere sounds? Or noise?

It is not always possible or desirable to give a formal definition of the topic of a program of study. We will not try to answer the question ‘What is music?’ in a neat, short formula. There are paradigm cases of music that most people in a particular culture can recognize. We can start with some exemplary cases from our own culture, such as a symphonic performance, a rock concert, or an advertising jingle. Many hear church bells, ringing out a simple melody, as music. However, not all sound is music. Could we draw up a similar catalogue of sounds that everyone would agree are not music? Perhaps the sounds of busy city traffic or the whine of a vacuum cleaner might strike us as obvious cases of nonmusic. But what about the sound of waves breaking on the beach? The howl of a wolf? Or the song of a bird?

While the extremes seem clearly distinguishable, there is no sharp line to be drawn between music and sounds that are not music. Whether sounds are taken as music or not depends in part on the context in which they occur. Debussy imitated the sounds of breaking waves in La Mer. Respighi’s orchestral score for The Pines of Rome included a recording of a real nightingale’s song. The blasts of real car horns punctuate Gershwin’s energetic orchestration in An American in Paris, while Edgard Varèse – who questioned the distinction between ‘music’ and ‘noise’ – included two hand-cranked fire engine sirens in his influential percussion piece, Ionisation. And Malcolm Arnold’s Grand, Grand Overture included three vacuum cleaners among the orchestral instruments!

In Hollywood films, the score often doubles or produces some of the sound effects accompanying a scene. In line with the idea that in space ‘there is nothing to carry sound,’ Steven Price’s Oscar-winning score for the 2013 film Gravity straddled both music and sound design, providing a soundscape that conveyed the expansiveness of space, the tension and emotion of each scene – and afforded something akin to sound effects, enabling the audience to feel the impact of the shuttle breaking apart and the massive explosions that sent debris flying through space. There is also John Cage’s 4′ 33″, a composition in which the performer does nothing for 4 minutes and 33 seconds to allow ambient and incidental sounds to define the composition. Here, the boundaries between sound and music, and the very definition of music in the absence of sound controlled by the composer or musician, are brought into question.

All-encompassing definitions of music may be elusive. Nevertheless, despite the fuzzy boundaries of the domain of music, it seems that there are auditory phenomena which we can generally agree are music, and on which there has been agreement in many cultures and historical epochs. Music is produced and perceived by human beings. Performers must learn the necessary skills to create ordered sound in meaningful patterns; through exposure or training, listeners must learn to perceive those features of ordered sound patterns as music. There is clearly room for a systematic study of all these skills, as diverse as they may be. The merging of psychology and music leads the way to such examination, and opens avenues to numerous and diverse topics for study.

The scope of the field

The psychology of music is motivated by a great many questions. Among other things, the field of psychology of music is concerned with the processes by which people perceive, respond to, and create music, and how they integrate it into their lives. These topics range from the way in which the ear extracts the pitch of a tone, to the way in which music is used to express certain emotions or transform moods. Though this field of study makes important use of cognitive psychology, it also draws on many other branches of psychology such as sensation and perception, cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, social psychology, and applied fields such as educational psychology.

The perspectives of each of these domains within psychology and more have shaped this book to some degree, as evident in the overall plan: Our exploration begins with a consideration of the physical properties of a sound wave, the transmission of sounds to the ear, and the neural bases of the perception and cognition of music. We then examine more closely the perception and cognition of melody, rhythm, and musical structure. Next, we trace the emergence and development of auditory capacities and musical abilities, and the acquisition of musical expertise, culminating in musical performance. Finally, we consider the question of meaning in music, and the social, emotional, and universal significance of music.

Interdisciplinary connections

The psychology of music attracts not only psychologists and musicians, but scholars and researchers from a wide range of other disciplines. The present volume is also informed by perspectives from fields such as acoustics, neuroscience, musicology, education, philosophy, and ethnomusicology, among other disciplines. We will provide a brief overview of these connections here.

More than 2000 years ago it was realized that the musical possibilities of sound as heard were shaped and constrained by the physical properties of sound waves as they interacted with the amazing powers of the ear. Pythagoras linked the weight of a vibrating object to pitch, while his followers extended his intuitions to include the vibrations of strings, linking pitch to the length of the string, and harmonics to the simple numerical ratios of those lengths. Acoustics is the science of the production, propagation, and reception of those vibrations in the air that are relevant to hearing in general and music in particular. But it is also more – as discussed in chapter 2, the way that musical instruments and the human voice shape the physical processes that reach the listener, as well as the properties of the performance venues where music is produced and enjoyed, are also parts of the science of acoustics.

With respect to neuroscience, recently there has been a real surge of interest in the neural underpinnings of human musicality, and the current volume considers the way that neural activity may constrain or enhance our experience of music and music-making. In order for us to experience music, the brain must pick up and import physical patterns from the auditory signal. Our studies must include an introduction to auditory neuroscience, beginning with the anatomy and physiology of the ear as presented in chapter 3, and moving on to a comparison between the neural bases of music and language processing in chapter 4. Recent discoveries from the field of neuroscience of music are also presented in sections within subsequent chapters on perception of melody and rhythm, music practice and performance, and emotion in music in chapters 5, 6, 10, 11, and 14 respectively, and sprinkled elsewhere in the book.

Insights from the field of musicology (the study of the structure and history of music) also continue to be essential to psychology of music, as evident in chapters 5, 6, and 7 on perception of melody, rhythm, and musical structure, and in chapter 14 on the emotional power of music. For example, in studying the power of music to ‘express’ emotions and its capacity to ‘induce’ emotional states in the listener, musicologists have addressed intriguing questions such as: How do musical structures give rise to emotions in listeners? Further, how does music come to have ‘meaning’ for the listener? The latter question is explored in chapter 13. A study of the basic theory of a practice involves bringing at least some of the underlying presuppositions to light as explicit principles, and subjecting them to critical examination. This is one of the ways that philosophical analysis is also an indispensable part of the psychology of music, bringing out certain presuppositions in the practices by which psychologists try to reach an understanding of music as a human phenomenon.

Figure 1.1Infant music cognition is just one of many growing areas of research that reflects the expansive scope of study in this field. Investigations in this area touch on various domains of study, such as sensation and perception, cognition, neuroscience, developmental psychology, social psychology, and applied areas such as music education.

Source: Photograph used with permission from the parent. Copyright © Jessica Phillips-Silver.

Within psychology of music, developmental psychologists are concerned with the emergence and maturation of musical behaviors, some of which are described in chapter 8 on music perception and cognition in infancy. How these emerging abilities may best be supported and refined is a question for music education, the focus of chapter 9. Musical performance requires the development of a set of highly elaborated skills, and a growing base of knowledge that allows for the sensitive interpretation of music. Innovative music education methods assume that all children are musical, and intensively immerse young children in creative and sensitive engagement with music with the aim of laying the foundations for lifelong musicality.

Finally, music is differentiated into a wide variety of musical cultures across the world, and as such, an anthropological perspective highlighting the study of distinct human cultures and their ‘musics’ is also relevant to an understanding of the psychology of music. These studies help us to differentiate between cultural sources of the features of a particular musical repertoire and those that may derive from the biological bases of musical perception. The application of anthropology to music is ethnomusicology, a major component of chapter 15. In this final chapter, we consider music as it is represented in a variety of societies around the world. But we shall not pretend to have answered entirely satisfactorily the enduring questions of what music is, how exactly it is created and received, and how music brings about the powerful effects that it does.

Range of research methods

Although the present discussion by no means exhausts all the questions and topics subsumed by the study of psychology of music, the richness and expansiveness of this field should already be apparent. Psychology of music is also distinguished by the scientific research methods commonly employed to study musical phenomena of interest, which leads one to a certain kind of explanation for the phenomena under investigation. There are many different kinds of explanations developed in the natural sciences, accompanied by various methods, and psychologists of music make use of many of them.

Throughout this book we will encounter a great variety of empirical studies, as various methods are needed to explore the whole gamut of musical experience. For some purposes, experiments manipulating specific variables in carefully controlled conditions are useful. A researcher may manipulate the tempo (or pace) of a song to determine if it alters listeners’ interpretations of the emotion that is being expressed. For other purposes, the recording and analyzing of real-time phenomena of musical production and experience are appropriate, such as when identifying the steps a concert pianist takes to learn and memorize a complex piece of music. In some instances, physiological methods or brain-imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (described in chapter 4) may be employed, for example to examine changes in the body or brain while listening to or performing music. Some investigators have even monitored the heart rate, breathing rate, and brain activity of musicians and audiences during live or virtual performances. Methods such as motion-capture may be used to track the fine motor movements of a musicians’ actions in real time, or to see how a musical quartet may coordinate their collaborative performance with communicative gestures. Electromyography may be used to measure electrical activity of muscles, in order to monitor subtle facial muscle movements as a singer is watching another vocalist perform. These are all examples of research topics discussed in the present book.

Qualitative studies and naturalistic observation also play an important part in studying the psychology of music. The nature of some aspects of musicality is best captured in rich observational studies of spontaneous activities in natural settings, such as observations of crowd behavior at live concerts, or of children playing musical games in playgrounds, or of parents singing to infants in their homes. These topics of study are also described in this book. Sometimes we can usefully sum up the musical experiences of a great many people in a sweeping generalization. In other cases, we need to pay close attention to music as it is perceived, appreciated, performed, or composed by an individual, if we are to reach a sufficiently detailed understanding of what is happening.

Since the days of the pioneering volumes in this field, including Carl Seashore’s The Psychology of Musical Talent (1919) and The Psyc...