Richard Ashley and Renee Timmers
Music is an integral part of human life and society; written, oral, and anthropological records attest to music’s ubiquity across time and space. Humans appear to have always and everywhere been a “musicking” species, and now as always human actions make, share, and comprehend music the world over. The last century and a half has brought changes to the music cultures of the world that are unprecedented in human history. Ever-changing technologies of music recording and dissemination have completely transformed not only who has access to music-as-sound, but also when this music can be heard. Analog and digital recordings, traditional broadcast media, and internet distribution of music have completely revolutionized the act of hearing music, removing the need for any listener to be physically co-present with performers. Dissolving the limitations of space and time, these technologies provide modern day listeners access to quite literally a world of music unimaginable at the dawn of the twentieth century. More recently, digital technologies have also impacted music composition, performance, and learning, allowing millions of people to make music in ways that are far less limited by one’s formal training or skills with traditional instruments and notation.
With these changes in the nature of musical engagement with music comes renewed interest in questions about music’s place in the life of humankind: How is music experienced not only by individuals, in brain and body, but also shared between and among people? How are musical skills developed? What biological markers or cognitive foundations are present for musicianship of various kinds to arise? Does technology fundamentally change the way music is heard and understood? In our present era, music and music-making are inevitably understood against the backdrop of science and culture: Music involves the brain, is shaped by culture, and raises fascinating questions about humankind’s relationship to the other species with whom we share the planet. Westerners with no formal training in science, music, or both approach music with tacit or explicit beliefs that it can, at least to some degree, be understood and explained with the methods used by scientists to understand language, reasoning, and other cognitive phenomena. The explanation of musical thought and behavior from a scientific perspective is the domain of music cognition, one of the most exciting interdisciplinary fields of the early twenty-first century.
The aim of the Routledge Companion to Music Cognition is to introduce a broad range of topics and research in music cognition to a wide audience, including students in music and the cognitive sciences, as well as musicians and music lovers who are keen to look into music from a more academic and scientific point of view. We seek to provide our readers with an accurate and nuanced understanding of the goals, findings and limitations of research in music cognition, and to offer pathways into more in-depth study of the diverse subject areas that make up the field. Music cognition, drawing from the domains of music theory and history, psychology, neuroscience, education, ethnomusicology, and sociology is presented as the field that investigates the psychological, physiological, and physical processes that allow music to take place, and to explain how and why it has such powerful and mysterious effects on us, and perhaps other species as well .
The Companion builds on the foundation provided by multiple disciplines, including music theory, musicology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. In combining such approaches, it addresses fundamental questions of the nature of music. Our starting point is that music is not primarily an acoustical stimulus of patterned sound: rather, music is viewed as a collection of vital and essential forms of human action. Music is possible because humans have found varied and creative ways, in their differing physical and cultural contexts, to use the human body and the physical world to organize sound in ways that are emotionally moving, intellectually appealing, and socially powerful.
In dealing with these questions, we have brought together authors who are themselves researchers, coming from a variety of backgrounds, both musical and scientific. Some have conservatory degrees in music, whereas others have received scientific training in psychology or neuroscience; likewise, some make their academic homes in departments of music and others in laboratories—and one cannot always predict any of this from the topics on which a given author is writing! We sought a mix of established researchers, some of whom have investigated their topics for decades, alongside outstanding younger scholars who bring fresh perspectives to the field. Their diversity of backgrounds is reflected in the multiplicity of research methods discussed throughout the Companion: laboratory experiments using behavioral measures such as pressing a button or moving a slider while listening to music; measuring physiological responses, such as “chills” on the skin or activity in the brain; investigating musical structure through the analysis of individual works or large corpora; using motion capture or video to investigate performers’ music-making; acoustic analysis of musical signals; and qualitative studies using in vivo observation, interviews, or questionnaires are all employed in the service of answering fundamental questions about the nature of music and musicality.
This Companion seeks to connect with readers in its breadth of topic and its explorations of diverse musical styles, genres, and repertoires. The music most central to research in music cognition has long been instrumental music from the Western art music or “classical” tradition. Within that tradition, the music most often chosen for study is typically “absolute”, in that it is not related to a story of some kind; instrumental, in order to avoid additional and potentially complicating factors brought in by lyrics; and intended to be heard in isolation from other activities, in a mode of aesthetic contemplation. We have learned much from research based on these kinds of materials, but part of our aim in this Companion is to “problematize” this approach. To this end, you will see chapters dealing with the history of Western polyphony and rock chord progressions side by side, chapters dealing with music played from notation and music played by ear, and consideration of the musicality of those who have learned and developed their skills outside of formal musical education. We hope to encourage researchers to broaden the range of music systematically examined in music cognition studies and thus broaden the range of topics investigated in the field.
The volume is divided into five parts. Part 1, “Music from the Air to the Brain,” begins with questions and answers about music and the brain, an area that has blossomed in recent years and received a surge of interest from academics and general public alike. You need not begin your reading of this book with these chapters, which are by necessity rather technical in nature, but you will find that they contain a wealth of information on the topics we find ourselves asked about so often. In this Part, our contributors introduce the methods of cognitive neuroscience and results from these methods that shed light on longstanding questions such as those about the relationship between language and music, and emotion and music. The initial chapters move from the peripheral auditory system—“the ear”—to the brain and body, exploring perception imagery (music “in the head”), memory, and rhythm and movement. The following chapters consider music’s effects on the mind and body, including the impact of musical experience on other cognitive functions such as reading, mathematics, and executive function, mental and physical health, and therapeutic applications of music. The final chapter in this Part addresses a question familiar since Plato—why does music make us feel the ways we do?—from a modern, neurophysiological standpoint.
Bearing in mind the composer Charles Ives’ famous question—“What has sound got to do with music?”—Part 2, “Hearing and Listening to Music,” deals with the structure and materials of music viewed both from a physical standpoint (the nature of sound) and a creative standpoint (how the resources of sound are used for artistic purposes). We begin with time and rhythm, the foundation of all musical experience and structure, and proceed to timbre, or the qualities of musical sounds, alone and in combination. The next three chapters deal with pitch organization in Western tonal music, beginning with an introduction to the topics of tonality, melody, and harmony, and what we know of how they are perceived. This foundation is followed by chapters that deal in more detail with the materials of Western “classical” music and “rock,” respectively. These chapters discuss the investigation of corpora—large datasets—as a research method in music cognition and present challenges to some assumptions about music theories as models for listening, suggesting new avenues for investigation. Following this, we present a chapter which deals with the perception and comprehension of longer spans of music and musical form, an understudied but important topic from both a musical and psychological standpoint. The remaining chapters in Part 2 put the perception of music into a variety of contexts. The first of these considers the impact of recording technology on how we comprehend music, now that most music is experienced via recordings. This is followed by a chapter dealing with the fascinating connections between music perception and perception using the other senses, and finally by chapters addressing special cases of music cognition: absolute (“perfect”) pitch and amusia, the loss or absence of normal musical abilities.
Part 3, “Making and Using Music” begins with composition, central to music but curiously understudied from a cognitive standpoint, and segues to improvisation. These chapters consider cognitive resources for composition and improvisation, proposing reliance on more general abilities for creativity and critical revision for composition, and speech-like communication for improvisation. Three chapters on performance follow. These deal with score-based, oral, and technological contexts for music performance, giving a sense of the many factors involved in understanding cognition and music performance in the diverse contexts of the twenty-first century. Each chapter highlights different but equally relevant factors that inform performance related to the historical context, social and cultural environment, or technological innovation. Mindful that “musicking” is a broad concept indeed, our contributors explore collaborative music making in ensemble settings involving not only instrumentalists but also conductors, as well as considering the role of musicians’ bodily movements in the creation and communication of expressive performances. Moving from performance to other musicking contexts, the remaining chapters of Part 3 consider the use of music in social settings: how music is used and understood in the context of film, everyday and advanced vocal musicianship, which addresses questions ranging from the processing of lyrics and music to benefits on wellbeing, and functions of music in the context of sport, work, and other daily pursuits. This Part of the Companion thus highlights not only skilled and expert music making, but also emphasizes the sophistication of everyday musical activities.
We consider musicality to be an essential part of what it means to be human, and so the Companion’s Part 4, “Developing Musicality” deals with musical nurture and nature. We begin with a topic currently of much interest to researchers and laypeople alike: is music only a human activity, or do other animals also have music of some kind? Turning again to human musicking, the development of musical thought and involvement in childhood is surveyed, followed by a chapter engaging “nature and nurture” providing an overview of current findings and debates about the interrelationships between genetics and experience in the development of musicality. We would hold that almost all humans are musical—but only a minority develop their musicality through formal training in music; the next chapter describes music learning in the informal settings which facilitate musical growth for most people. The penultimate chapter in this Part discusses the musical lives of adolescents, the life-stage where music is so important, and so formative, to many. This leads to the final chapter of this Part, which examines individuals’ personalized music choices and uses of music to address cognitive-emotional goals and needs in an individually appropriate manner.
Part 5 of the Companion, “Musical Meanings”, may be the first destination for many readers, as the topics here are evergreen. We begin with a survey of approaches to music perception, from the ancient Greeks to the present, journeying from the music of the spheres to music in the brain. What and how music communicates, and the relationship between music and emotion, are discussed in our own chapters, before the Companion turns to questions of musical thought, the appreciation and value of music, and the varied meanings that we find and construct in our experiences with music. These chapters relate music to other human behavior and discuss processes of sense-making drawing relationships with interactions with our natural environment, social communication, neurophysiological responses, but also abstract and linguistic thought. Any or all of these topics could easily have introduced the volume, for the questions they engage continue to resist easy answers: What do we feel when we hear music? How and what does music communicate? Why do we care about music, and in the end, what does music mean? We cannot promise that the Companion answers these questions with any finality, but do guarantee that in these chapters every reader will find a greater understanding of, and appreciation for, the variety of human thought, creativity, and action which gives rise to music and wishes to share it with others.