Music Cognition - History

History

Music cognition was definitively 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 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. The latter view was famously expressed by noted cognitive scientist Steven Pinker when he referred to music as "auditory cheesecake". But as cognition in music is increasingly acknowledged as fundamental to our understanding of cognition as a whole, music cognition should be able to contribute both conceptually and methodologically to cognitive science. Topics in the field include:

• 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 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 the relatively novel disciplines of 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 for general unawareness of the role of music in its wider social and cultural context. The cognitive revolution made scientists more aware of these aspects.

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 that 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.

Although the idea of music having an effect on cognition is fairly new, researchers say that musical training increases behavioral performance. This research linking music and cognition is helping scientists to understand the great power music has on our environment today.