Investigations Through the Centuries
Kyung Myun Lee
Music cognition involves research on human beings who listen to, enjoy, and perform music. Given the long human history of music, as evidenced by the earliest musical instrument, made some 40,000 years ago (Higham et al., 2012), it is no surprise that questions about the human experience of music have also long been discussed. Indeed, the history of thought regarding music cognition goes back to ancient Greece. Whereas current studies on music cognition investigate how people process music in the auditory system and brain, using advanced technological tools and scientific methods, early studies depended solely on the observation of phenomena or the introspection of mental and physical states. Scientific and experimental methods have been used to examine cognition of music since their development in the 17th century (Cohen, 2010). The history of music cognition is closely related to the history of both physics and psychology, as scientific understandings of both sound and humans contribute to the field. By reviewing studies of music cognition from ancient Greece to early 20th century, this chapter will describe how research on music cognition has developed, and how its topics and methods have changed.
Perhaps the earliest question about the human experience of music which drew scholarly attention is that of consonance and dissonance—what people feel when two tones are heard together, and why certain musical intervals heard as more consonant than the others. The ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras (c. 582 BC–c. 497 BC) answered this question by examining numerical relationships—ratios—and consonance. He compared the weights of various hammers and the sounds they produced. Although Pythagoras did not leave any written record of his investigations, they were described by Nicomachus of Gerasa (c. AD 60–c. AD 120) as follows:
Pythagoras was plunged one day in thought and intense reasoning, to see if he could devise some instrumental aid for the hearing which would be consistent and not prone to error, in the way that sight is assisted by the compasses, the measuring rod and the dioptra, and touch by the balance and by the devising of measures; and happening by some heaven-sent chance to walk by a blacksmith’s workshop, he heard the hammers beating iron on the anvil and giving out sounds fully concordant in combination with one another, with the exception of one pairing; and he recognized among them the consonance of the octave and those of the fifth and the fourth. He noticed that what lay between the fourth and the fifth was itself discordant, but was essential in filling out the greater of these intervals. Overjoyed at the way his project had come, with god’s help, to fulfillment, he ran into the smithy, and through a great variety of experiments he discovered that what stood in direct relation to the difference in the sounds was the weight of the hammers, not the force of the strikers or the shapes of the hammer-heads or the alteration of the iron which was being beaten. He weighed them accurately, and took away for his own use pieces of metal exactly equal in weight to the hammers.
(Barker, 2004, p. 256)
In the period of the ancient Greeks, the octave, perfect fifth, and perfect fourth were categorized as perfect consonant intervals. What is attributed to Pythagoras is the assertion that the weights of hammers producing those intervals corresponded to certain integer ratios. Thus, the octave results from a 1:2 ratio, while the perfect fifth and perfect fourth arise from 2:3 and 3:4 ratios (Boethius, 1989; Crocker, 1963; Palisca, 2001); we will return to this conclusion later in this chapter. After Pythagoras, the emphasis shifted from ratios of weights to those of lengths of vibrating strings. Thus, on the monochord, an ancient instrument having one string fixed at both ends over a resonating box, placing your finger in the middle of the string divides the length of the string in half, and the produced sound is one octave higher than the original string sound: The octave results from the 1:2 ratio of the whole to stopped string lengths.
So, even though this question about consonance and dissonance was concerned with the human experience of musical intervals, in ancient Greek thought the most important issue was the set of numerical relationships symbolized by music, not the psychology or physiology related to humans listening to musical intervals. For Pythagoras and his followers, numbers were of great interest per se; the structure of the universe itself was explained with numbers. It was suggested that celestial bodies, such as the Sun, Moon, and planets, are in mathematical relations and their movements could be heard as the “music of the spheres” (Godwin, 1992). This numerical symbolism of music was criticized for its lack of empirical evidence by Aristoxenus (flourished 4 BC), a pupil of Aristotle’s. In his Elementa harmonica, Aristoxenus suggested that the account of music should deal with the phenomena and principles of sounds perceived by the ear (Zbikowski, 2002). Thus, he held that the flow of a melody as sensed by the ear is more important for musical judgments than the mathematical relation of musical intervals. These two opposing points of view on consonance were reconciled by Ptolemy (Zbikowski, 2002). Ptolemy’s treatise on consonance proposed that the Pythagorean explanation of consonance is not actually incompatible with Aristoxenus’ explanation; rather, the one naturally follows the other, because consonant intervals having integer ratios are naturally heard as more pleasant and harmonious by the ear. The significance of music as a psychological and mental phenomenon sensed by the ear became more and more important for scholars considering music, and led, by the mid-16th century, to the doorway of a modern science of music cognition.
Whereas scholars in the Greek period used only in situ observations for research, experimental methods have been considered as necessary since the beginning of the scientific revolution in the 17th century. The use of controlled experimental approaches was a key element differentiating modern science from medieval natural philosophy. It was researchers such as Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), and Sir Issac Newton (1642–1727), who made significant contributions to this change from observation-based to experiment-based empiricism. In his book Opus Majus (1998/1928), Bacon (1214–1292) said, “He therefore who wishes to rejoice without doubt in regard to the truths underlying phenomena must know how to devote himself to experimentation” (p. 584). While previous scholars sought to arrive at the truth by reason and by observing natural phenomena, the empiricists of the 17th century sought evidence gathered from scientifically designed and controlled experiments. Beyond the physical sciences, the introduction of experimental methods also had a great influence on music cognition research. Vincenzo Galilei (ca. 1520–1591), the father of Galileo Galilei, is remembered as one of the member of the Florentine Camerata and a supporter of the Baroque monody style—the foundation of early opera—but he was also famous for a number of experiments that he conducted in acoustics. To investigate how the material and tension of a vibrating string influence its pitch, he used various strings made of gut and steel and found the errors which existed in the Pythagorean theory about weight (mass) and consonance (Cohen, 2010). Specifically, Galilei found that the ratios between strings producing a consonant musical interval change depending on their material and tension. For example, an octave generated by a string with different tension could be the result of the ratio 1:4 instead of 1:2. Whereas Pythagoras explained that all physical components of vibrating objects—such as the weight of a hammer, the weight and length of a string, and the diameter and length of a pipe— corresponded to a 1:2 ratio for octave, Galilei showed that a 1:2 ratio is applicable only to the length of string, not to other factors such as weight of a hammer or diameter of a pipe. This topic was pursued by others, including Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), supporting the relationship between pitch and a vibrating string’s length.
Experimental and scientific research on sound was first categorized under the label of acoustics. Phenomena such as pitch, musical intervals, and scales began to be investigated as topics in acoustics instead of speculative music theory. Following in the footsteps of his father Vincenzo, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) also employed the methods of experimental science and examined the relationships between pitch and frequency. He suggested that sounds are generated by pulses, which he called “shocks” or “percussions.” According to Galileo, the vibration of a string makes successive pulses, which are transmitted through the air to the ear and finally are sensed as sounds (Cohen, 2010). Focusing on the physical transformation of sound pulses to the response of the ear, not on the mathematical relations of strings, his study laid an early foundation for research on the sensation and perception of sound (a topic which was to be intensively examined in the 19th century). During the eighteenth century the discipline of physical acoustics continued to evolve, with the development of better tools for precise, objective measurements and experimental techniques, and made significant progress. Sauveur (1653–1716) first discovered the harmonics of a complex tone. The mathematicians Daniel Bernoulli (1700–1782) and Leonard Euler (1707–1783) analyzed the vibrations of sound waves and Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813) suggested the theory of the propagation of sound. Joseph Ernst Chladni (1756–1827) measured harmonics by using the movement of sand on a vibrating sound-board or elastic surface. Charles Cagniard de la Tour (1777–1859) contributed to the absolute measurement of pitch by inventing a disk siren, in which a certain pitch was generated by the rotation of the disk.
After the 17th century, the natural sciences continued to develop rapidly, and it became possible to think that science would have the power to explain all natural phenomena (Cohen, 2010). The basic scientific idea of this period was that of mechanism —the universe is like a great machine, with its smallest constituent components consisting of atoms. According to this framework, if we know the laws by which atoms work, we are able to predict how the machine will behave (Westfall, 1971). While the physical aspects of sounds were actively investigated by researchers in acoustics in this period, the sensation and perception of sounds was not a parallel research area, because it was thought that human nature is not subject to the same, mechanical laws as hold in the physical world. However, in the 19th century, experimental methods that had proven themselves successful for the natural sciences were adapted and applied to the study of humans. In particular, psychophysicists such as Ernst Weber (1795–1878) and Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887) showed that psychological phenomena, including sensation and perception of weight and touching, could be mathematically quantified as a function of physical phenomena. Experimental, objective, and mathematical approaches to mental phenomena were promoted with the rapid development of biology in the late 18th century and early 19th. In addition, interest in the sensing organs of the human body rapidly increased. It was thought that the perfect understanding of musical experiences would not be possible without also understanding the sensation and perception of sounds. The first step researchers took in knowing how humans sense and perceive sounds was to explore the “ear”—the peripheral auditory system. Thus, in this period, research on sound was associated with the physiology of the ear.
In Germany, the growth in universities made possible the progressive development of science and promoted interdisciplinary research on music and science through the association of psychoacoustics and physics. Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), a German physicist and physiologist, was of great importance for research connecting the ear and sound. His extensive On the Sensation of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (1954/1877) explained how the ear responds to sounds through the analysis of different frequencies, and how this process is related to the more phenomenological experiences and feelings accompanying the perception of music. Helmholtz also tried to answer the issue of consonance and dissonance of musical intervals in terms of the mechanism of the ear. Instead of relying solely on the ratios of numbers attributed to musical sounds, he claimed that dissonance is caused by low frequency amplitude fluctuations that occur when two tones of a dissonant interval are close in frequency to one another. When a musical interval produces such an amplitude fluctuation approximately 33 times per second, the effect is perceived as “rough-ness,” and it is this roughness, arising from wave interferences, which makes musical intervals sound dissonant (Helmholtz, 1954/1877, p. 181). In such explanations, which connected the physiology of the ear with the physical properties of sounds, Helmholtz was a great pioneer, bridging the divide between music and science.
As a physicist and physiologist, Helmholtz made a significant contribution to psychological research by showing how to use experiments to investigate psychological phenomena. However, Helmholtz didn’t think of psychology as an independent field of research; it was Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) who built up psychology as an independent scientific discipline. After graduating as doctor of medicine from Heidelberg, Wundt gained experience in physiological experiments as an assistant to Helmholtz and founded a laboratory in 1879 at the University of Leipzig, which was considered to be the world’s first devoted to psychology. By compiling experimental approaches and theories about mental phenomena, Wundt contributed to the foundation of psychology as a discipline distinct from philosophy. Many students were trained in Wundt’s laboratory and some of them became renowned psychologists, leading the next generation of research. Wundt was interested in analyzing the components and elements composing consciousness, an approach which his student, Edward Titchener (1867–1927) termed structuralism. It was during this time that scientific research on psychological aspects of human nature began to take root and grow.
The other important German figure of music cognition in the 19th century is Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), a musicologist as well as a psychologist. Stumpf played an important role in establishing psychology as an independent discipline by founding a psychology laboratory in Berlin; he made numerous contributions to the discipline beyond those dealing with music. As a musicologist, he was a pioneer in the field of comparative musicology (vergleichende Musikwissenschaft) publishing significant works, including his influential Origins of Music (2012/1911). Stumpf discussed the issue of consonance and dissonance from a different point of view from Helmholtz. When we argue why certain musical intervals sound more consonant than others, “nature or nurture” is an important issue. Some claim that the human ear and brain are pre-wired to hear and prefer consonance, whereas others insist that a preference for consonance is the product of enculturation, because we are frequently exposed to consonant relations of pitches. These contrasting positions are represented by Helmholtz and Stumpf. Stumpf foregrounded the effects of experience and cultural context on consonance and dissonance, whereas Helmholtz explained consonance from the perspectives of acoustics and physiology. That is, for consonance, Stumpf emphasized the judgment or opinion (Urteil) of listeners, whereas Helmholtz focused on the sensation (Empfindungen) of sound. By conducting behavioral experiments, in which participants were asked to decide how well two tones of each interval fused together (“Verschmelzung”), Stumpf tried to explain consonance and dissonance as the products of cognitive, mental processing (Stumpf, 1898). From this perspective, the sensation of sound is related to a lower level of auditory processing occurring in the ear, but the judgment of sound is related to a higher level of processing occurring in the brain. The higher the level of auditory processing, the more important the effects of experience and training become. Given that Stumpf himself was a trained musician and knew very well the phenomenology of hearing musical intervals, it seems natural that he emphasized the role of experience and training. Stumpf influenced research on musical talent in the next generation of psychologists. These included Géza Révész (1878–1955), who studied musical aptitude by observing the pianist Erwin Nyiregyházi (1903–1987) and based the book The Psychology of a Musical Prodigy (1970/1925) on Nyiregyházi’s development from the ages of 6 to 12.
The motivating framework for psychology in the early 20th century was functionalism, which was concerned with the ways in which mental processes adapt to a changing environment (Schultz, 1981). Functionalism’s emphasis on practical aspects of human thought and behavior naturally led to an interest in the application of psychological research to real-world settings. Introspection, a method previously used for research, was supplemented by new methods in functionalism, including mental tests, questionnaires, and objective descriptions of behavior (Schultz, 1981).
Among early 20th-century psychologists interested in music, Carl Seashore was the most significant researcher in America. Seashore, who immigrated to the United States from his native Sweden as a child, was the first recipient of a PhD in psychology from Yale University (Devonis, 2012). After graduation, he returned to Iowa and in the 1920s developed one of the most productive laboratories working in music psychology, at the University of Iowa. With his notable accomplishments and highly influential record of publication, he became Dean of the Graduate School at Iowa in 1908 and held this position until 1936 (Devonis, 2012). As an experimentalist, Seashore was interested in the measurement of vision, audition and learning; He invented many devices for accurate measurement of sensation and perception. By applying his experimental apparatus to the measurement of sound, Seashore pioneered psychological research on music performance. With specially designed equipment and tools which permitted tracking the real-time changes of musical sounds as produced by performers, Seashore analyzed pitch and intensity changes to investigate such phenomena as tempo rubato and vibrato. His studies—carried out in an era without the benefits of computer technologies—measured and analyzed piano, violin and vocal performance, and vastly improved the level of music performance research.
Another line of Seashore’s research involved the evaluation of musical ability through systematic testing. Merged with his talent for music, his interest in the measurement of individual differences and intelligence naturally led to the development of his groundbreaking tests for musical aptitude and skill: the Seashore Tests of Musical Ability. These tests provided a concise way to assess musical ability and have been widely used in elementary and secondary schools. Seashore’s approach was to treat musical ability as related to auditory acuity, and his tests measured such acuity by asking a listener to compare pairs of sounds with regard to their pitch, timbre, duration, and rhythmic patterning. Ultimately, this kind of high auditory sensitivity to sound was found to be not sufficient for becoming a good musician (Mursell, 1937a); nevertheless, in spite of their limitations, Seashore’s tests were particularly valuable in suggesting the use of scientific principles and objective measurements to assess music-related aptitude. The rhythm part of the test is still used as part of the assessment test for brain injuries (Burger, Denney, & Lee, 2000). Seashore’s seminal book The Psychology of Music (1938) summarized his research including music performance, the measurement and analysis of musical talent, the development of musical skills, learning in music, and mental images of music .
One year before Seashore published The Psychology of Music (1938), James Mursell (1893–1963) published a book with the same title (1937b). Although both Mursell and Seashore’s books reviewed the perception of basic components of music, including rhythm, melody, and tonality, their views on musicality differed significantly. As a music educator, Mursell thought musicality to be “a complex syndrome in the sense that it represents and is indexed by a wide array of acoustical, physiological, psychological, and socio-cultural factors,” (Jorgensen, 2013, p. 69), whereas Seashore viewed musicality “as a simple construct discrete from other aptitudes and abilities, represented and indexed by a person’s aptitude for and ability in aural discrimination” (ibid, p. 69). By considering the “awareness of relatedness among tones” rather than “pitch discrimination” (Mursell, 1937b, p. 326), Mursell addressed music in a more holistic way and supported the Gestalt approach to music, to which we turn shortly.
Although “music cognition” is a current term for psychological and scientific research on music, emphasizing its cognitive aspects, the terms “psychology of music” and “music perception” were more often used in the 1980s and 1990s. These were broad terms, encompassing research on many aspects of how music is heard and understood by human beings. In the second half of the 20th century, music psychology research often adopted an approach derived from information-processing frameworks. In such approaches, the process of perceiving and comprehending music could be divided into two stages. The earlier stage is that of sensation and perception, dealing with the processing of fundamental components of sounds, such as pitch, loudness, and duration; such processing was seen to be mainly occurring at the “ear” (the peripheral auditory system) and the lower, subcortical parts of the central nervous system. The later stage is that of cognition, where more strictly musical parameters and components, such as melody, rhythm, harmony, and tonality are processed. Although both of these stages are important for understanding music listening, research in music psychology from the 19th century to the middle of the 20th mainly focused on the early stage of musical processing—that is, the processing related to sensation and perception. The stimuli used for these perceptual, experimental studies were typically simple tones that were hard to be heard as music. Thus, the German word Tonpsychologie, “the psychology of tones,” which was the title of Stumpf ’s magnum opus (1890), would still be a proper name for some studies researching music perception. The necessity for music psychology to address the higher cognitive level of musical processing became increasingly important in the 1930s. Early in that decade, the monograph Musikpsychologie (1931) by Ernst Kurth (1886–1946) presented what may be considered a shift in focus away from tone psychology to music psychology. The more cognitive the level of musical processing is, the more complex it is to be elucidated, because more various factors, such as individual differences caused by cultural experiences or training, should be considered. By stating the relation of music and exterior variables involved in music psychology, Kurth distinguished music psychology from tone psychology (Gjerdingen, 2012).
The early decades of the 20th century also saw a new approach to psychology, the Gestalt school. The German word Gestalt means “shape” or “configuration.” The well-known sentence, “the whole is different from the sum of its parts” clearly shows the concept of Gestalt psychology. In the Gestalt approach, an additive sensing of each element does not straightforwardly lead to the perception of the whole; the processing of a whole shape is totally different from the sensing of components. In 1923, the German psychologist Max Wertheimer (1880–1943) suggested Gestalt principles, or “laws,” of perceptual organization evidenced by experimental data: Proximity, Similarity, Closure, Prägnanz, and Good Continuation (Wertheimer, 1938/1923). The law of Proximity predicts that parts of a percept very close to one another in time or space tend to group together. The law of Similarity states that parts which are similar in shape, size, or color tend to be seen as belonging together in a group. The law of Closure is a tendency to complete figures even when the part of the figure is missing, as for example when there is a momentary break in an otherwise continuous line. The law of Prägnanz reflects the perceptual tendency to avoid ambiguity, seeking to interpret stimuli in simpler rather than more complicated ways; for example, given a figure which can be interpreted as a single complicated shape with many angles or two simpler shapes superimposed on one another, we prefer the latter. The principle of Good Continuation describes that “in designing a pattern, for example, one has a feeling how successive parts should follow one another; one knows what a “good” continuation is, how “inner coherence” is to be achieved, etc.; one recognizes a resultant “good Gestalt” simply by its own “inner necessity” (Wertheimer, 1938/1923, p. 325). The Gestalt movement started and thrived at first in Germany, but with the rise to power of the Nazis, moved in large part to the United States, brought there by eminent Gestalt psychologists including Max Wertheimer (1880–1943, the New School for Social Research in New York City), Kurt Koffka (1886–1941, Smith College in Horthampton) and Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967, Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania).
Although the first generation of Gestalt psychologists did not consider music as a topic of research, music provides good examples of Gestalt theory: Listening to an individual tone, or a series of individual tones, is different from listening to the melodic shape or contour formed by series of tones. In the 1960s and 1970s, music psychologists, such as Leonard B. Meyer (1918–2007, University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania), Diana Deutsch (1938–, the University of California at San Diego), W. Jay Dowling (1941–, the University of Texas at Dallas), and Albert Bregman (1936–, McGill University) all based significant aspects of their approaches to perception and grouping mechanisms of melody and rhythm on the Gestalt principles. Some of these have become widely accepted: In melody perception, there is a tendency to group tones with close pitches together (Proximity); tones with similar timbres tend to be heard as one melodic line (Similarity); and a relatively larger musical interval or gap within a melody tends to be heard with filling it (Closure) (Dowling & Harwood, 1986). The Gestalt approach to psychology has greatly influenced the field of music psychology and served as the precursor of the coming cognitive revolution by emphasizing the role of consciousness and mental process beyond the level of auditory sensation.
In the early 20th century, behaviorism suggested that all psychological phenomena could be explained by the objective observation of overt behavior responding to stimuli, while rejecting the study of consciousness. However, after World War II, psychologists realized that complex human behaviors could not be explained with extremely simple stimulus and response relations as traditional behaviorism suggested. Psychologists began to understand how people actively encode, process, and manipulate incoming information, instead of simply passively reacting to stimuli. By examining attention, memory, and decision-making processes, the newly emerging “cognitive” psychology tried to reveal the mechanisms of information processing in the human mind, with concepts and methods drawn from related fields including information theory, linguistics, and computer science (Bechtel, Abrahamsen, & Graham, 2001). “Mind” and “consciousness” came back to the field of psychology and became the main issue to be discussed. In his influential book Cognitive Psychology (1967), Ulrich Neisser suggested that cognitive psychology “refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.”
In the field of music psychology, the cognitive era saw researchers change their emphasis from sensation to cognition of music. Two famous postwar scholars who examined music from the cognitive point of view were Robert Francès (1919–2012) and Leonard B. Meyer (1918–2007). Both were influenced by Gestalt psychology and investigated the mechanisms of music listening and its induction of emotion in the mind. As a psychologist, Francès used advanced experimental methods to obtain listeners’ responses to music, while Meyer, as a humanist, employed an interdisciplinary approach influenced not only by psychology, but also by music theory and aesthetics (Gjerdingen, 2006).
Emotion and Meaning in Music (Meyer, 1956), building in part on earlier theories by William James and others regarding the psychology and physiology of emotion in humans, connected musical structures and a listener’s prior experience with such structures in a psychological framework, and argued that the emotion raised by the unexpected or delayed progress of music toward some structural goal is related to the meaning of music. In this book Meyer explained that “Affect or emotion-felt is aroused when an expectation—a tendency to respond—activated by the musical stimulus situation, is temporarily inhibited or permanently blocked” (Meyer, 1956, p. 31), setting the stage for a vast empirical literature on musical affect (see Timmers, this volume). Musical meaning was also central to Meyer’s thought; in a strikingly modern passage even today, he states “Embodied musical meaning is, in short, a product of expectation. If, on the basis of past experience, a present stimulus leads us to expect a more or less definite consequent musical event, then that stimulus has meaning” (p. 35; for more on meaning, see Clarke, this volume).
In his book La perception de la musique (1988/1958), Francès said, “We must distinguish between the effects of acculturation—unreflective, involuntary, and resulting from almost passive familiarity with works—and the effects of education, where perceptual development is supported by the acquisition of concepts and symbols that provide for the definition of forms, their elements and articulations” (Francès, 1988/1958, pp. 2–3). By conducting sixteen musical experiments, Francès tried to disentangle the effects of acculturation and education on music listening. The results of these experiments indicated that listeners develop mental schemas for music from their experience. Through repeated exposure to music, listeners build expectancies to musical events (Francès, 1958/1988). This idea is consistent with Meyer’s theory of expectation: “The norms and deviants of a style upon which expectation and consequently meaning are based are to be found in the habit responses of listeners who have learned to understand these relationships . . . dispositions and habits are learned by constant practice in listening and performing, practice which should, and usually does begin in early childhood” (Meyer, 1956, p. 61).
As reviewed in this chapter, the broad sweep of the history of music cognition moves from mathematics and acoustics to “tone psychology” to music psychology—from sound to sensation to cognition. While tone psychology focuses on “bottom-up” processing, proceeding from the acoustic signal to sensation, music psychology also deals with “top-down” processing at cognitive levels, where cortical functions are at the forefront. Of course, for a more complete understanding of the musical mind, both bottom-up and top-down processes must be explained. The significance of top-down factors has long been appreciated, as shown by the work of Stumpf and others. In the modern era, the approaches of Francès and Meyer are valuable in seeking a full explanation of music processing, encompassing both bottom-up and top-down aspects. In particular, they identified the role of top-down factors in the process of music by highlighting the effects of experience, acculturation and education. These effects of experience, culture and education on music continue to be better understood through ever-more sophisticated investigations by current cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists.
This chapter has given a broad overview of the history of music cognition. We see that questions about music and the musical experience which were asked in ancient Greece are still being discussed at the present time, but framed in very different ways and using very different methods of investigation. Questions of the nature and qualia of musical intervals—our starting point with Pythagoras—are still under active investigation. Recent studies still ask why certain musical intervals are more consonant, but also why people prefer consonance and how education and acculturation influence consonance preference (Lee, Skoe, Kraus, & Ashley, 2015; McDermott, Schultz, Undurraga, & Godoy, 2016). We have seen that these questions were first raised by philosophers in ancient Greece, later were investigated by physicists, and are now discussed by psychologists as well as music theorists. In the 21st century, the science of mind has developed rapidly and research on the brain has increased explosively. Advanced technologies to explore the brain open up new possibilities to discuss questions of music cognition (Bigand, & Tillmann, 2015) and guarantee that we will be provided with endlessly news ways to further our insight into age-old questions.
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