Music Perception

Most people assume that the world is just as they perceive it to be. But experiments have forced researchers to confront the reality that this is not the case. What we perceive represents the end of a chain of mental events that give rise to a mental representation of the physical world. Our brain imposes structure and order on certain sequence of sounds and thereby creates what we call music. Molecules in the air vibrate but do not themselves make a sound. Sound—and three of its musical components, pitch, loudness, and timbre—are psychological constructions, present only in the minds of perceivers. Thus, to answer Bishop Berkeley's famous question, if a [Page 549]tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it (even if it falls on top of a stack of pianos!), it doesn't make a sound, although it may make physical disturbances in the atmosphere. Music perception can thus be defined as those processes undertaken by the human mind in creating music from the physical properties of sound. This entry reviews the components of music, experimental methods for studying music perception, and a few of the most prominent topics in the field, including the neuroanatomy of music (music and the brain), music and emotion, and music and personality.

The focus of research in music perception and cognition encompasses the mental and neural operations underlying music listening, music-making, dancing (moving to music), and composing. The science is interdisciplinary, drawing principally on methods from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and music theory, as well as from musicology, computer science, linguistics, sociology, genetics, and evolutionary biology. Music processing is a complex, high-level cognitive activity, engaging many areas of the brain and employing many distinct cognitive operations. As such, it is a useful tool for understanding functions of the mind and brain and informing larger issues in cognitive science, such as memory, attention, categorization, and emotion.

The field traces its origins to experimentation with musical instruments in ancient Greece and China. Aristoxenus (364–304 BCE) argued that one must study the mind of the listener, not merely the collection of sounds impinging on the ear. In the late 1800s, Hermann von Helmholtz, Gustav Fechner, and Wilhelm Wundt first applied modern scientific methods to study musical experience. Today, music psychology is experiencing a renaissance, with an exponential increase in scholarly activity over the preceding decades. This surge of interest follows increasing communication across scholarly disciplines, the emergence of cognitive psychology in the 1960s, and new technologies that facilitate the preservation, presentation, and manipulation of sound (e.g., magnetic tape, hard disks, computers, digital signal processing).