Additional Reading

TONALITY AND PITCH

Overview

Moore, Brian C. J. (2004). “Pitch Perception.” In An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing, 5th edition. New York: Elsevier Academic Press. 195-214; 230-31.

Tan, S., Pfordresher, P., & Harré, R. (2010). “Chapter 5: Perception of Musical Pitch and Melody.” In Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance. New York: Taylor & Francis, 73-94.

Lerdahl, Fred (1988). Tonal pitch space. Music Perception 5: 315–349.

Shepherd, Roger. “Circularity in Judgements of Pitch.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 36 (1964): 2345-53.

Butler, David, and Helen Brown (1984). Tonal Structure versus Function: Studies of the Recognition of Harmonic Motion. Music Perception, 2.1 (1984): 6-24.

Kessler, E. J., Hansen, C., and Shepard, R. N. (1984). Tonal schemata in the perception of music in Bali and the West. Music Perception, 2: 131-65.

Krumhansl, C. L., & Shepard, R. (1979). Quantification of the hierarchy of tonal functions within a diatonic context. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 5: 579-594.

Krumhansl, C., & Kessler, E. J. (1982). Tracing the dynamic changes in perceived tonal organization in a spatial representation of musical keys. Psychological Review, 89: 334-368. {Focus on pp. 340-344.}

Note: Krumhansl & Kessler’s “Experiment 1” makes use of “Shepard’s Tones,” described in the middle paragraph of the right side of p 340. These tones are described in more detail in Deutsch, 1991—and in my review of her work. (See Unit 1.)

MUSICAL ABILITY

Dalla Bella, S., Giguere, J.-F., & Peretz, I. (2007). Singing proficiency in the general population. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 121: 1182-1189.

Racette, A. & Peretz, I. (2007). Learning lyrics: To sing or not to sing? Memory & Cognition, 35: 242-253. 

Rauscher, F. H., Shaw, G. L., & Ky, K. K. (1993). Music and spatial task performance. Nature 365: 611.

Schulkind, M.D. (1999). Long-term memory for temporal structure: Evidence from the identification of well-known and novel songs. Memory & Cognition, 27: 896-906. 

V. Melody and Form

MELODY and TONALITY:

Margulis, Elizabeth (2005). A Model of Melodic Expectation. Music Perception 22/4: 663–714.

Kessler, E. J., Hansen, C., and Shepard, R. N. (1984). Tonal schemata in the perception of music in Bali and the West. Music Perception, 2: 131-65.

Krumhansl, C. L. (1996), 13, 401–432. Perceptual analysis of Mozart’s Piano Sonata K.282. Music Perception.

{For reference: Lerdahl, Fred (1996) Calculating Tonal Tension. {Contains an analysis to which Krumhansl refers.}

FORM (in Tonal Contexts)

Narmour, Eugene (2000). Music Expectation by Cognitive Rule-Mapping. Music Perception 17/3: 329-398.

Ibid. (1996) Analyzing Form and Measuring Perceptual Content in Mozart’s Sonata K. 282: A New Theory of Parametric Analogues. Music Perception 13/3 (Spring): 265-318.

OTHER EXPERIMENTS:

Schulkind, M.D., Posner, R., and Rubin, D. (2003). Musical Features That Facilitate Melody Identification: How Do You Know It’s “Your” Song When They Finally Play It? Music Perception 21/2 (Winter): 217-249.

Parncutt, R., and Bregman, A.S. (2000). Tone Profiles following Short Chord Progressions: Top-down or Bottom-up? Music Perception 18:1, 25-57.

Krumhansl, Carol, & Kessler, Edward (1982). Tracing the dynamic changes in perceived tonal organization in a spatial representation of musical keys. Psychological Review 89: 334-68.

OTHER OVERVIEWS/METASTUDIES:

Burns, E. M., & Ward, W. Dixon. “Categorical perception: Phenomenon or epiphenomenon? Evidence from experiments in perception of melodic musical intervals.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 63 (1978): 456-468.

Krumhansl, C. L., & Shepard, R. (1979). Quantification of the hierarchy of tonal functions within a diatonic context. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 5, 579-594.

Larson, Steve (1997). The Problem of Prolongation in “Tonal” Music: Terminology, Perception, and Expressive Meaning. Journal of Music Theory 41/1, 101-136.

Notes on J. Bispham's (2006) "Rhythm in Music..." (Music Perception 24/2)

Notes on

Bispham, John. “Rhythm in Music: What is it? Who has it? And Why?” In Music Perception, Volume 24, Issue 2, December 2006, pp. 125–134. 

homologous — trait (e.g. physiology, capacity, behavior, tendency/inhibition, etc.) shared due to common ancestry

homoplaisic — trait (e.g. physiology, capacity, behavior, tendency/inhibition, etc.) shared due to common selection pressures.

Many have argued that MRB is adaption due to mother-infant interaction, coalition signaling, muscular bonding … reinforced through human-infant altriciality, female exogamy, sociality.

MRB (Musical Rhythmic Behavior)  = a “constellation of concurrently operating, hierarchically organized, subskills including 

- general timing abilities,

- smooth and ballistic movement (periodic and non-periodic), 

- the perception of pulse, 

- a coupling of action and perception, and 

- error correction mechanisms.”

also 

ballistic movement — movement involving muscular initiation without necessary muscular continuity, i.e. bouncing, slapping, flinging, throwing, jumping (as opposed to putting, pressing, carrying, elevating, depressing, etc.) 

1. Periodic Production.

Wallin (2000) distinguishes metric, alternating movement (in many animals) from similar movement in humans, in that the latter can be entrained to an external stimulus. However, (according to Bipsham), not all rhythmic activity is metric/alternating. 

2. Perception

Monkeys distinguish human languages based on attention to rhythm, as do infants younger than 5 months. (Infants older than 5 months distinguish languages within rhythmic classes, based on narrower criteria.) 

3. Temporal Structuring

Animal communication in general is organized according to impulses for regulation of the behavior of others…conditioning is enough to predispose a signal that would affect another animal’s behavior. Conditioning endows signals with predictability. What appears to be temporal patterning may be just be redundancy (repeating a signal as the state of a condition persists), or “the epiphenomenal outcome of conflicting signaling functions.”

Rhesus screams’ timbres (and pitches?) are minimally distinct from individual to individual, but their rhythms must be distinct because monkeys can distinguish one another regardless…

Ape drumming is more a factor of phylogenetic proximinity and homologies related to motor skills.

Is “song” analagous between humans and other species?

McDermott and Hauser (2005) — no, animal song occurs under restricted conditions, is functional, sexual dimorphism.

Fitch (2006): contrasting pure enjoyment with biological function is a conflation of two levels, “none of the arguments provide compelling grounds for rejecting the traditional analogy between human and animal song.”

“…range of behaviors [in song] raise important and interesting issues regarding possible analogies to 

- vocal learning, 

- modes of perceiving temporally structured events and 

- sequecing of complex motor actions.”

 (not only contextually distinct, but distinct in mechanism)

(1) entraining mechanisms, and (2) interpersonal interaction are absent.

4. Ecological engagement

“internal oscillatory mechanisms shared between different domains of human behavior and cognition strongly suggest that entrainment in music constitutes an evolutionary exaption of more generally functional mechanisms for future-directed attending to structured events” 

BUT

— “the creation of a mutually manifest interactive framework for communication based upon a sustained ‘musical’ pulse

— period correction mechanisms

— coupling action with perception”

  … are all aspects of MRB that are not accounted for in exaption model above.

5.  Temporally structured duetting interactions

6 % of bird species coordinate duets, but could be “synchronous commencing of fixed action patterns”…rather than entrainment

Geisman (2000): Gibbons produce “rigid, precisely timed, complex…well-patterned duets”

but (Bipsham) “no evidence of a pulsed framework being employed.” 

 (nevertheless, excitation is related to the quantity of sound and interaction, and the activity is therefore interactive… —> strong analogy to MRB.) 

6. Synchronous chorusing

Synchrony derives from advanced signalling or “phase correction” (rather than period correction).

— participants desiring to signal first

— cooperative effort to maximize output

— predator avoidance

7. Nonmusical human interaction

personal entrainment is manifest in all human interactions, ranging from 

(a) loose, subconscious use of pulse as a framework for interpersonal/turn-taking interactions, to

(b) strict adherance to pulse (groove) in group behavior and synchronicity of output where participants are aware of the pulse ramework and desire to maintain a degree of temporal stability and group-coordination (e.g., music and dance). 

But “(a) precedes (b) ontongenetically (and possibly phylogenetically) and is … less complex…[MRB] cannot be explained as having evolved with relation exclusively to nonmusical behaviors.

ontogenesis — progressions of development occurring within a single organism

phylogenesis — progressions of development occuring in the course of species evolution

MUSICAL RHYTHMIC BEHAVIOR What is human-specific and music-specific?

Musical Pulse

Arom (1991) “a succession of sounds capable of giving rise to a segmentation of time during which it flows in isochronous units…there can only be music inasmuch as it is measured and ‘danceable.’”

“Internally generated and/or externally guided attentional pulse is a … widely accepted feature of temporal perception in which perceived regularities build expectations as to the timing of future events…Musical pulse, however, would appear to be distinct in that it is

— maintained over time and is

— perceived unambiguously or at related hierarchical levels.”

“Production and/or entrainment to a musical pulse putatively involve internal periodic oscillaory mechanisms overlapping with motor-coordination, and provide a mechanism to affect and regulate levels of physiological arousal.” 

Period correction vs. phase correction

“…phase correction adjusts for asynchronies between the last response and stimulus events assuming an unchanged period…” and 

“seems to represent independent processes of largely automatic action control,” 

“dependent only on intention.”

“…period correction modifies the next target interval on the basis of discrepancies between the timekeeper interval and the last or last few interstimulus intervals, thus altering the period of the attentional musical pulse”…

“facilitated by or incurs conscious awareness of the tempo change and can thus be interpreted as a representations of intentional cognitive control” (Repp, 2001). 

Requires “intention, attention, and awareness.”

Notes on G. J. Whitrow's "What Is Time" (NY: Oxford, 1972)

G. J. Whitrow. “The Significance of Time.” Chapter 1 of What is Time? (New York: Oxford University, 1972).

***

{ background: some information about the “block universe” theory of time—that all times coexist, and that the universe is a four-dimensional block—as well as that theory’s alternatives:

<http://www.ipod.org.uk/reality/reality_block_universe.asp>

And (linked within the above), Paul Davies’ article in Scientific American

<http://www.ipod.org.uk/reality/reality_mysterious_flow.asp> }

***

Notes on the text:

p 128

According to Plato (Timaeus)

Natural law prefigures the universe, and is timeless, provided by ideal forms in a state of rest (abstract, unchanging)

Space = a preexisting framework, in which the universe exists, but 

Time produced by the universe, by its fluctuation and change

Time = “that aspect of change which bridges the gap between … the material universe and its ideal model.” 

p 129

According to Bertrand Russel

“Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the present, and a certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential to philosophic thought.” 

p 130

“Time’s arrow depicts the irreversible before-and-after succession of events”

“Time’s passage refers to the distinction that we make between past, present, and future.”

p 131

According to M.J.E. McTaggart

Time must be an illusion because

1. An event must never cease to be an event, and as an event, must never cease to have whatever characteristics it has, except

2. Its characteristics in relation to time, that its status as a far-future event, near-future event, present event, near-past event, etc. are in constant flux

3. the time at which a future event is past is in the future, the time at which a past event is future is in the past, and those times are also events, i.e. the changing state of an event as past, present and future is a state that also proceeds through time

p 132

Whitrow: McTaggart’s error is to treat time itself as a process in time.  

(Discuss: analogy in time-travel movies—the characters always go either forward or backward in time, and then proceed back to the present. In what temporal framework does this “and then” occur? Is there any temporal sense in which H.G. Wells, or Marty McFly, were once in another time, and are now “back”?)

For a meteorologist or paleontologist, the concept of “now,” and the transitional nature of the present moment, is a crucial feature — 

(BLC: in contemplating processes unfolding in the past (paleontology) in terms of their having caused the enigma present evidence, or unfolding in the future (meteorology) in terms of their predictability in light of present evidence, the role of the present as a moving divisor, is essential.)

But for physics and some philosophical endeavors, it’s adequate to regard the significance of the present moment as an illusion; it is “sufficient to concentrate on the relations of ‘earlier than’ ‘later than’ and ’simultaneous with’.” 

“Some philosophers have argued that one cannot define the present except in reference to itself…there is no reason to suppose that what it defines has objective significance…Instead of accepting this view, can we establish the objectivity of past, present, and future?”

p 134

“In practice, we do not normally encounter [discrepancies between subjective experiences of “now”], and the world would be much more complicated if we did.” —> (BLC: within what contemporary physicists sometimes refer to as an “event horizon”, the concept of now has an objective, unifying reality, in that contiguous parts of the known universe respond in a unified way to similar impacts upon them… )

… “if the universe admits a common cosmic time for observers fixed in the galaxies (emphasis mine) then in terms of this cosmic time all events have a unique time-order.” and “we come back to Plato’s idea that time and the universe are intimately associated.” 

Atoms of Time

“The plausibility of these assumptions…that time is homogeneous and continuous…was…greatly strengthened by the development of precise methods and machines for the measurement of time…[and] by the general decline of belief in traditional [uneven] temporal associations” with seasons, “magical” notions of 7-year life cycles, and other cyclical/agrarian conceptions of time’s passage.

p 135

Puritan “routine of six days of work followed by a day of rest,” along with other industrial notions of time, were “an important step toward the social acceptance of the modern notion of time as even in quality, as opposed to the primitive sense of time’s unevenness and irregularity.”

“Nowadays most of us tend to accept automatically the idea that time is continuous because we believe i nthe continuity of our existence. 

p 136 

“The continuity of time” can be “called into question…Instead of time being infinitely divisible…like matter and energy, it may be atomic or granular in structure.” 

Corresponding to the material and atomic structure of space, a chronon “might be the time required for light to cross” minimum spatial displacements in an atom… “the possible existence of a chronon is a revolutionary idea that calls into question a fundamental feature both of the scientific idea of time that has prevailed in recent centuries and of the popular conception of time that most people accept intuitively.”

Precognition and the nature of time

“Another of the traditional properties of time that has also occasionally been called in question in recent years is its unidimensionality.”

p 137

“Suppose I precognize an event which is to occur next Sunday. In one respect — that is to say, in one dimension of time — this event has not yet come into being: it is still future and does not yet exist. But in another respect, or second dimension of time, it is past and so has already come into being.” (Demonstrate visually w/ Cartesian coordinates.)

Philosopher C.D. Broad: 

(GJW paraphrasing: “the phrase ‘future event’ does not describe an event of some special kind, as the phrase ‘sudden event’ or ‘historic event’ does. Instead, a future event is nothing but an unrealized possibility until it comes to pass and therefore can itself influence nothing, although the present knowledge that there will be such an event can influence our actions when it is called to mind…” 

p 138

“the hypothesis of two-dimensional time is…not required to explain [such cases].”)

The transitional nature of time

“In a block universe, as we have seen, past, present and future do not apply to physical events, and so they neither come into existence nor cease to exist — they just are.”

“If we inhabited a block universe, mental events would have a completely different kind of existence from physical events.” (Destruction of cause and effect.)

IV. Music, Emotion, and Meaning

Provocation:

Krumhansl, Carol (2002). Music: A Link between Cognition and Emotion. Current Directions in Psychological Science 11/2, 45-50.

Balkwill, L., & Thompson, W.F. (1999). A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Perception of Emotion in Music: Psychophysical and Cultural Cues Music Perception 17/1: 43-64.

REVIEW (from Unit 1): Panksepp, J. (1995). The Emotional Sources of “Chills” Induced by Music. Music Perception 13/2, 171-207.

Main discussion:

Eerola, T., and Vuoskoski J. K. (2013). A Review of Music and Emotion Studies: Approaches, Emotion Models, and Stimuli. Music Perception 30/3, 307-340.

Livingstone, S. R., & Thompson W. F. (2006). Multimodal Affective Interaction. Music Perception 24/1. 89-94.

(For context: Review BC’s notes on Justus & Hutsler (2005) Fundamental Issues in the Evolutionary Psychology of Music: Assessing Innateness and Domain Specificity. Music Perception 32/1: 1-27.)

Experiments:

Leman, M., Desmet, F., Styns, F., Van Noorden, L., & Moelants, D. (2009). Sharing Musical Expression Through Embodied Listening: A Case Study Based on Chinese Guqin Music. Music Perception 26/3, 263-278.

Schäfer, T., Sedlmeier, P. (2011). Does the Body Move the Soul? The Impact of Arousal on Music Preference. Music Perception 29/1, 37-50.

Additional Reading:

Smith, Kenneth (2010). ‘A Science of Tonal Love’? Drive and Desire in Twentieth-Century Harmony: the Erotics of Skryabin. Music Analysis 29:1/3, 234-263.

Koelsch, S. et al. (2004). Music, language, and meaning: Brain signatures of semantic 

processing. Nature Neuroscience 7, 302-307.

Grewe, O., Nagel, F., Kopiez, R., Altenmüller, E. (2007). Listening To Music As A Re-Creative Process: Physiological, Psychological, and Psychoacoustical Correlates Of Chills And Strong Emotions. Music Perception 24/3, 297-314.

Brower, Candace (2000). A Cognitive Theory of Musical Meaning. Journal of Music Theory 44/2, 323-379.

Schellenberg, E. G., Krysciak, A. M., Campbell, R. J. (2000). Perceiving Emotion in Melody: Interactive Effects of Pitch and Rhythm. Music Perception 18/2, 155-171.

REVIEW (see Unit I): Patel, A. (2006). Musical rhythm, linguistic rhythm, and human evolution. Music Perception 24, 99-104.

REVIEW (see Unit I): Patel, A. D., Gibson, E., Ratner, J., Besson, M., & Holcomb, P. J. (1998). Processing syntactic relations in language and music: An event-related potential study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 10, 717-733.

III. Dimensions of Musical Experience

Part I—due April 25

 

Stevens, S. S. “On the Theory of Scales of Measurement.” In Science, New Series, Vol. 103, No. 2684 (Jun. 7, 1946), pp. 677-680.

 

And here’s good, brief, primer on the fundamental content of the article above, in plain English. (Or corporatespeak?): Peter Flom. Nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio. Statistical Analysis Consulting (Professional/commercial web page). First retrieved September 1, 2013.

 

Lerdahl, Fred (1992). Cognitive constraints on compositional systems. In Contemporary Music Review 6:2, 97-121.

 

*** 

 

Part II—(optional for following week)

 

AUDITORY SCENE ANALYSIS (Foundations):

 

Bregman, Albert. Auditory Scene Analysis: hearing in complex environments. In McAdams, S. & Bigand, E. (eds.) Thinking in Sound: The Cognitive Psychology of Human Audition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 10-36.

 

Gregory, Andrew (1994). Timbre and Auditory Streaming. Music Perception 12:2, 161-174.

 

EXPERIMENTS:

 

Povel & Essens (1987). Grouping conditions in listening to music: an approach to Lerdahl & Jackendoff’s grouping preference rules. In Music Perception 4:4, 325-359.

  

Tekman, Hasan Gürkan (1995). Cue trading in the perception of rhythmic structure. Music Perception13:1, 17-38.

Dowling, W.J. (1973). Rhythmic groups and subjective chunks in memory for melodies. Perception & Psychophysics, 14, 37-40.

Differentiation of dimensions and their impact on perception

McAdams, Stephen (1989). Psychological constraints on form-bearing dimensions in music. Originally in Contemporary Music Review, 4:1, 181-198.

 

McAdams, S., and Matzkin, D. (2003). “The roots of musical variation in perceptional similarity and invariance.” In I. Peretz & R. J. Zatorre (Eds.), The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 76-94.

 

Deliège, Irène (2001). Similarity Perception ↔ Categorization ↔ Cue Abstraction. In Music Perception 18:3, 233-243.

  

Additional reading:

Wessel, David (1979). Timbre Space as a Musical Control Structure. Computer Music Journal, 3/2, 45-52.

Carson, Benjamin (2007). Perceiving and distinguishing simple timespan ratios without metric reinforcement. Journal of New Music Research 36/4. 313-336 [focus on pp 317-322].

II. Evolution, Ecology, and the Beat

—> Trouble with JSTOR via UCSC’s off-campus login? You can also read the full-texts online via a free account.

All (April 18th):

Huron, D. (2003). “Is music and evolutionary adaptation?” In I. Peretz & R. J. Zatorre (Eds.), The cognitive neuroscience of music. New York: Oxford University Press. 57-75.

Justus, T., & Hutsler, J. J. 2005. Fundamental issues in the evolutionary psychology of music: Assessing innateness and domain-specificity. Music Perception, 23: 1–27. 

BC’s notes on Justus & Hutsler

Optional:

Patel, A. (2006). Musical rhythm, linguistic rhythm, and human evolution. Music Perception, 24: 99-104.

Hauser, M. D. (2009, July). The possibility of impossible cultures. Nature, 460 (7252): 190-196.

Trainor, L.J. (2006). Innateness, learning, and the difficulty of determining whether music is an evoluationary adaptation: A commentary on Justus & Hustler (2005) and McDermott & Hauser (2005). Music Perception, 24: 105-110.

Bispham, John (2006). Rhythm in music: What is it? Who has it? And why? Music Perception 24/2:135-142.

Graham, Roger (2006). Music as Socio-Emotional Confluence: a Comment on Bispham. Music Perception 24/2: 169-170.

Elena Selezneva, Susann Deike, Stanislava Knyazeva, Henning Scheich, André Brechmann, and Michael Brosch (2013). Rhythm sensitivity in macaque monkeys. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 7/49. <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3764333/>

Peter Cook, Andrew Rouse, Margaret Wilson, and Colleen Reichmuth (2013). A California Sea Lion (Zalophus californianus) Can Keep the Beat: Motor Entrainment to Rhythmic Auditory Stimuli in a Non Vocal Mimic. Journal of Comparative Psychology, Online First Publication, April 1, 2013. doi: 10.1037/a0032345. See also: <http://news.ucsc.edu/2013/04/sea-lion-beat.html>

Additional reading: 

Fedorenko, E. et al., (2009). Structural integration in language and music: Evidence for a shared system. Memory & Cognition, 37 (1): 1-9. 

Gill, K. Z., & Purves, D. (2009). A biological rationale for musical scales. PLoS One, 4(12), e8144

 

Grahn, J.A. & Brett, M. (2007). Rhythm and beat perception in motor areas of the brain. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19: 893-906.

Cross, I. (2003). Music, cognition, culture, and evolution. In I. Peretz & R. J. Zatorre (Eds.), The cognitive neuroscience of music. New York: Oxford University Press, 42-56.

Khalfa, S., Roy, M., Rainville, P., DallaBella, S., & Peretz, I. (2008). Role of tempo entrainment in psychophysiological differentiation of happy and sad music. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 68: 17-26.

London, J. (2004). Meter as a kind of attentional behavior.

McDermott, J. (2008). The evolution of music. Nature, 453: 287-288.

McDermott, J.H. (2009). What can experiments reveal about the origins of music?  

Patel, A. D., Iversen, J. R., Bregman, M. R., & Schulz, I. (2009). Studying synchronization to a musical beat in nonhuman animals. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1169: 459-469.

Patel, A. D., Iversen, J. R., Chen, Y., & Repp, B. H. (2005). The influence of metricality and modality on synchronization with a beat. Experimental Brain Research, 163, 226-238. ASSIGNED: pp. 228-237.

Patel, A. D. (2010). Music, biological evolution, and the brain. In: M. Bailar, (Ed.). Emerging Disciplines. Houston, TX: Rice University Press (pp. 91-144). 

Ramachandran V.S. & Hubbard E.M. (2003). Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes, Scientific American, 288(5): 42-4.

Schachner, A., Brady, T. F., Pepperberg, I. M., & Hauser, M. D. (2009). Spontaneous motor entrainment to music in multiple vocal mimicking species. Current Biology, 19: 831-836.

I. Introduction to Empirical Study

Provocations:

[For access to the Nature articles below, you need to be on a campus network, or, if you’re off campus, you need to be logged in for Off Campus Access, with your library barcode.]

Cook, N. (2008). Science & music: Beyond the notes. Nature, 453 (7199): 1186-1187.

Trainor, L. J. (2008). Science & music: The neural roots of music. Nature, 453 (7195): 598-599.

Empirical Studies:

Before reading the studies below, it may be useful for you to scan my (in-progress) “glossary of terms” found in the behavioral and mind sciences. (There are additional background materials on cognitive science and the psychology of music in “Optional Background Reading” below.) In my glossary, take a quick look at the entries on “t-test,” “Pearson coefficient” and “p-value”—they’ll help you understand how the strength of correlational data is assessed. If you find terms in these articles you don’t understand, that you’d like help with, please let me know.

Due April 4:

1. Panksepp, J. (1995). The Emotional Sources of “Chills” Induced by Music. Music Perception 13/2, 171-207.

2. Please participate in Deutsch’s empirical study online, without reading the materials due April 11.

***

Due April 11:

1. read at least the first two pages, and pp 132-135, of my review of Deutsch’s work, then

2. Deutsch, Diana (1991). The tritone paradox: An influence of language on music perception. Music Perception8.4: 335-47. 

[ Optional: Bruno Repp’s Reply, and Deutsch’s rebuttal, are included in the link above. ]

3. Project: Describe (to the group) a “first draft” of an experimental design, in which an independent variable and dependent variable are potentially related, and what confounding variables might make that relationship difficult to learn.

One other provocation:

Dewey, John. (1934). “The Live Creature.” Chapter 1 of Art as Experience. New York: Perigree.

Optional Background reading:

Pfordresherer, Peter et al. “The Scope of the Psychology of Music,” in Siu-Lan Tan, Peter Pfordresher, and Rom Harré, eds. The Psychology of Music: from Sound to Significance. Hove & New York: Psychology Press (Taylor & Francis), 2010.
  

Reed, Steven K. “The Information Processing Approach,” in Cognition [Fifth Edition]. Belmont: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 1999.
   

Born, Georgina. “Music Research and Psychoacoustics,” in Jonathan Sterne, ed., The Sound Studies Reader. London & New York: Routledge, 2012.

Syllabus

Ben Carson  [ email / more info ]  Course number 22032

Mondays 4 - 7 PM in Music Center 245

Office hours — rm 148: Mondays 1:00 - 2:00 pm, Wednesdays 12:00 - 1:00 pm 

Description: 

Investigations in the psychology of musical listening and awareness. Topics include time and rhythm perception, auditory scene analysis, pattern recognition, and theories of linguistics applied to harmony, melody, and form in the music of diverse cultures. Explores applications of the cognitive sciences to music transcription, analysis, composition, interpretation, and performance practice. Students apply existing knowledge in the cognitive sciences to a developing creative or analytical project, or develop and conduct new experiments. Enrollment restricted to graduate students. Enrollment limited to 16. May be repeated for credit. B. Carson.

Useful links:

Glossary of Terms

Major Project Prompts: Version 1 (Empirical Study) Version 2 (Critical Review)

Society for Music Perception and Cognition’s ”Resources”

What is Music Cognition? (According to Ohio State University’s faculty, including David Huron)

The Royal College of Music’s Center for Performance Science

Prospectus:

What is the empirical study of music perception—and what should it be? After an initial exploration of traditional empiricism and psychology, we’ll explore the core of Cognitive Musicology as a discipline, which has traditionally focused on the the brain’s processing of music’s acoustic dimensions. More recent empirical studies have examined the impact of social structures, cultural communication, belief systems, and the development of identity, on our experience of music.

Seminarians in 206D will engage in two parallel streams of learning. On the pragmatic level, a series of empirical studies—in no way chosen to be comprehensive or canonical—will familiarize us with current scientific approaches and knowledge, on aspects of music’s relationships to the mind. At the same time, we’ll pursue a series of readings about what it means to think empirically, and how empirical investigations are designed—we do this not only to think critically about the state of the discipline (which, like all science, has plenty of chances to fail!), but to consider the best possible frameworks for our own questions and research.

APPROXIMATE CALENDAR

I. Introduction to Empirical Study (March 28, April 4)

II. Evolution, Ecology, and the Beat (April 11 with Guest Chris Dobrian, April 18)

( My notes on Justus & Hutsler (2005) Fundamental Issues in the Evolutionary Psychology of Music: Assessing Innateness and Domain Specificity. Music Perception 32/1: 1-27. )

III. Dimensions of musical experience, grouping, and streaming (April 25, May 2 with guest Larry Polansky)

IV. Music, Emotion, and Meaning (May 9 with guest Dard Neuman, May 16)

V. Melody and form (May 23 with guest Lisa Margulis)

(Final presentations: Wednesday, June 8 — 7:30-10:30 pm.)