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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, computer science, philosophy, and linguistics.
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[edit] Overview
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
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. 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.
