Writing on the relationship between music and human behavior goes back to classical antiquity – and in a broad sense the psychology of music therefore has a very long history. The Greek philosophers Aristoxenus, Plato, and Aristotle all made important contributions to an understanding of the nature of musical materials and their effects on people, and were very aware of the power of music to cause both psychological and social unrest, as well as its capacity to calm, soothe, divert or give pleasure. Important though these writings are from a historical perspective, and in their continuing influence on contemporary psychology of music, what would now be recognized as the psychology of music dates from the rise of psychology itself in the second half of the nineteenth century. The two most influential figures in early music psychology were Hermann von Helmholtz and Carl Stumpf, representing very different theoretical positions, but both focusing principally on what might be called “the elements of music”: the sensations of pitch, rhythm, intensity, and timbre. This can be seen both as reasonable – since there is a certain logic in looking at what might be thought of as the building blocks of music (pitches and rhythms) as a first step; and as ideologically loaded – positioning music as an object, separated from human activity and divorced from its context. Helmholtz’s and Stumpf’s approaches were the forerunners of contemporary psychoacoustics, the study of relationships between acoustical events (frequencies, durations, and intensities) and their psychological counterparts (pitches, timbres, rhythms, and loudness).
Helmholtz was an experimental psychologist, committed to the idea that an understanding of the physics of sound could be combined with an understanding of the physiology of the auditory system to provide an explanation of music and musical experience (Helmholtz 1954 [1885]). His explanation of consonance and dissonance, for example, depended on the idea that the patterns of vibration in the inner ear, created by dissonant combinations of sounds, produced interference patterns which were perceived as a quality of beating or roughness. A physical attribute (the frequencies of the components of two or more notes) is directly related to a physiological attribute (a pattern of vibration on the basilar membrane of the inner ear) that results in a perceptual experience (consonance or dissonance). From these physical and physiological principles, Helmholtz ultimately hoped to develop an empirically based scientific account of musical aesthetics.
Stumpf was also interested in using experimental findings, but committed to the primacy of human experience, and in this sense anti-reductionist in outlook. He too developed a theory of consonance and dissonance, which took account of acoustical theory, but also prioritized the intuitions and reported experiences of expert musicians. An accomplished musician himself, he was acutely aware of the highly differentiated perceptual sensitivities that musicians develop, and of the significant effects of local and wider context on people’s musical judgments – an attitude that is difficult to reconcile with Helmholtz’s more physicalist outlook. Stumpf’s sensitivity to the impact of context led him to a much broader interest in the music of other cultures than was typical for many of his contemporaries, making him an important figure in the early development of ethnomusicology. In many ways, Helmholtz and Stumpf represent two different approaches to music psychology that are still apparent more than a century later: Helmholtz stands for an empirical scientific approach, whose aim is to explain the complexity of human musical experience in terms of a linked chain of physical, physiological, and psychological mechanisms; Stumpf represents a tradition that argues for the irreducibility of human experience, open to systematic investigation, but thoroughly embedded in its social and cultural context.
After the work of Helmholtz and Stumpf, research in music psychology did not cease altogether, but the trickle of publications from 1900 to the late 1960s remained disparate in both subject matter and approach, with the consequence that a coherent field or discipline never really took shape. An exception is the program of research carried out by Carl Seashore at the University of Iowa in the 1920s and 1930s. Seashore’s achievement was to develop new ways to study musical performance with a detail and precision that had never been possible before (summarized in Seashore 1967), using musically realistic materials played by expert musicians.
Mainstream Anglophone psychology was dominated by behaviorism from the 1920s to the early 1960s, during which period there was an intense concentration on the observable behavior of humans and other animals, and a resistance to theorizing about mental states and processes. With the work of the linguist Noam Chomsky (1957), and a growing number of psychologists on whom Chomsky’s work had a dramatic influence (e.g. Miller, Gallanter and Pribram 1960), came the cognitive revolution – a radical change in psychology in which the emphasis turned emphatically away from behavior toward the mental processes and internal representations that might be inferred from the manifest capacities of human subjects. The connection with language (through Chomsky’s work) is significant: language is a distinctively human capacity that is endlessly creative, and yet rule-governed – as shown by native speakers’ sensitivities to “unacceptable” utterances. You do not have to be a trained linguist to know that there is something wrong with the utterance “Green furiously ideas sleep colourless,” while “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously,” though semantically anomalous, is perfectly acceptable grammatically.
In simple terms, Chomsky’s approach to language was to assert that linguistic competence must be understood as the expression of a small number of powerful grammatical rules that both constrain the otherwise infinite possibilities of a language and, at the same time, permit an indefinite number of new utterances to be created. Chomsky’s theory quickly became immensely influential in linguistics, and was also adopted by many psychologists who saw the possibility to extend this principle beyond language into many other aspects of human behavior. A rule-based approach seemed to offer a powerful way to understand vision, motor skills, memory, creativity – and music.
Like language, music seems to be infinitely creative and yet highly structured, and just as Chomsky proposed that people’s language use could be explained by what he called a generative grammar (a finite set of rules that could generate, or analyse, an infinite number of utterances), so others saw this as a way in which to understand how competent listeners make sense of completely new pieces of music – as long as they are in a familiar style. Musical style is the equivalent of a language, and a piece is like an utterance – a sequence of sounds that may never have been encountered before, but uses principles that are familiar from many other instances. This seemed to be a very powerful way in which to understand all kinds of phenomena in music psychology: melodies that are easy to remember conform to a readily identifiable pattern or “grammar” (Deutsch and Feroe 1981); music that is interesting and emotionally engaging is rule-governed, but does not simply adhere slavishly to those rules – arousing but not always confirming a listener’s expectations (Dowling and Harwood 1986); and expressive playing can be understood as a performer’s systematic, but not entirely predictable, use of rules that relate musical structure to expressive gestures and transformations (Clarke 1988).
Around 1980 there began a dramatic increase in the productivity, profile, and wider acceptance of the psychology of music, with the founding of a number of important journals, and a stream of significant book publications (e.g. Davies 1978; Deutsch 1982; Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983; Sloboda 1985; Dowling and Harwood 1986). The strong emphasis in the great majority of the work published at this time (and which remains a dominating theme) was on the relationship between musical structure and psychological processes, most obviously expressed in the title (and contents) of Howell, Cross and West’s (1985) Musical Structure and Cognition. The fundamental question addressed by this approach was how listeners perceive, remember, evaluate, and distinguish between different musical sequences, and the primary theoretical framework took mental representations of musical structures as its central principle.
Consider the following example: do listeners find it easier to remember tonal melodies than atonal melodies; and if so, why? A standard way to research this kind of question is to construct a series of melodies which differ in tonality while keeping other properties the same (rhythm, register, average interval size, tempo, etc.). The melodies might then be played to a group of listeners who are subsequently tested for the accuracy of their memory either by singing back each melody as soon as they have heard it, or by judging whether a “comparison melody” is the same or different from the original. In this research paradigm, the key to understanding what listeners remember, and the kinds of mistakes that they make, is presented as a function of the kind of internal representation that they form; and the research question is a search for the most appropriate, powerful, or plausible model of listeners’ internal representations, based on evidence for the tunes that they find easy or difficult to remember, and the patterns of errors that they make in laboratory studies.
Research from the 1980s is dominated by proposals for the kinds of models that might explain listeners’ behavior, using geometrical, mathematical, computational and rule-system approaches. In 1992, John Sloboda wrote a review of what he regarded as the most influential published research in the psychology of music in the period 1980–1990, focusing on the leading journal Music Perception (Sloboda 1992). Overwhelmingly, the most influential publications were concerned with hierarchical representations of musical structure, presented in more or less formalized terms; and foremost amongst these models was Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff’s A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983) – a book-length study of the ways in which the perceptions and intuitions of experienced listeners to tonal music might be understood by means of an explicit cognitive rule system. After a period in the 1960s and 1970s when the relatively small volume of research in music psychology was largely focused on highly abstracted and rather un-music-like materials (isolated pitches and durations), Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s theory coincided with, and stimulated, an engagement with more musically realistic materials.
With the spread of music psychology from psychology departments into music departments, a further transformation of the field began to take place, the consequences of which are still evident. The structuralist-cognitive phase of music psychology – typified by Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s theory and Carol Krumhansl’s influential empirical work – had been consistent with prevailing trends in both music theory and musicology (a preoccupation with formalist analysis, and structuralism more generally); and with cognitive science – the institutionally powerful combination of psychology with artificial intelligence and computer science. A reaction against what was perceived as the quantitative and formalist character of these traditions began to develop in the early 1990s, and music psychology – without abandoning the cognitive tradition that it had embraced so effectively – started to branch out in more qualitative, social, and developmental directions. An example is Jeanne Bamberger’s book The Mind Behind the Musical Ear (1991), which used a detailed study of a small number of children to explore the specific character of children’s musical minds. The approach was directly influenced by the work of the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, and made use of far more qualitative methods and individually tailored materials and procedures than is typical of cognitive methods with adults. A practical reason for this is that many standard empirical research methods are simply inappropriate for infants and young children: you cannot ask a six month old (nor, probably, a six year old) to rate a melody on a numerical scale, or to indicate whether two melodies are the same or different. Ingenious methods have been devised to assess whether very young infants can discriminate between musical materials (see below), but the developmental psychological research of the 1980s and 1990s (for instance, looking at children’s songs or invented notations) often started out with a qualitative and descriptive approach, recording (in the broad sense of that term) what it was that children did musically in relatively naturalistic situations.
Research on performance (which saw dramatically increased activity in the later 1980s) also began to branch out from the generative, and structuralist approach into more social domains concerned with communication both between performers, and between performers and their audiences. This connected with research in musical emotion and meaning – and various kinds of qualitative or more mixed (qualitative and quantitative) methods began to develop. Rather than looking only at the digital data of performance, researchers also began to pay proper attention to what performers said about their own performances (e.g. Chaffin, Imreh and Crawford 2002). Ethnomusicologists had been arguing for decades for the importance of paying close attention to the behaviors and discourses of musicians in their own cultures, and the ethnomusicological technique of participant observation (observing and describing a musical culture from the “inside”) showed how revealing it can be to try to understand “musicking” (Small 1998) through close interaction with indigenous musicians. The sociologist Tia DeNora has also been influential in this regard, her book Music in Everyday Life (2000) documenting some of the many ways in which people encounter and use music in their daily lives, through interviews, diaries, and covert or participant observation.
As the programs of international conferences indicate, a broadly cognitive approach still dominates the psychology of music. Because the frequency processing characteristics of the ear are an obvious and fascinating aspect of its anatomy and physiology, and because of the enormous emphasis on pitch in music theory, music psychology was for a long time also dominated by studies of pitch. More recently, however, rhythm and timing have attracted increasing research attention, partly as a reaction against the dominance of pitch, and partly because of the way that rhythm in its broadest sense is crucially involved in musical performance and communication. From the earliest developmental interactions to the most skilled expert performances, the control of time has been shown to be a crucial and fascinating aspect of human musicality (Malloch and Trevarthen 2008).
Educational and “everyday life” perspectives have gained considerable momentum (e.g. Clarke, Dibben and Pitts 2010), together with research into emotion, meaning, and the social functions of music (e.g. Juslin and Sloboda 2001; North and Hargreaves 2008). This trend reflects a recognition of the limitations of laboratory- style research on what has often been presented as the “fundamentals” of music (the perception and cognition of “primary” musical materials – pitches, rhythms, melody). The “primary materials” outlook is based on a specific view of music (as an object, abstracted from its contexts, uses and circumstances) that was increasingly challenged within musicology in the last decade of the twentieth century, and the prospect of an all-conquering cognitive science of music, powered by the methods and principles of the physical and computational sciences, has started to look very much less plausible than it once did to some people.
Alongside developing interests in a more social and applied approaches, there are also perspectives offered by biological and cultural evolution (Cross 2003; Wallin, Merker and Brown 2000); and an awareness of the importance of the body in music – ranging from the “macro” level of bodily gesture and movement in the production and perception of music, to the “micro” level of neuroscientific studies of music and the brain (e.g. Peretz and Zatorre 2003; Patel 2008).
As music psychology has changed and developed, it has inevitably been preoccupied with, or conversely blind to, different questions at different times. If we confine ourselves to the period since 1980, then the overriding preoccupation of the cognitive psychology of music (up to the mid-1990s) was the question of musical structure: how listeners formed mental representations of musical structures as they heard or remembered music, and how performers made use of, or responded to, musical structures as they played music expressively or tried to read and memorise it. Tonal and rhythmic structures have dominated, and other aspects of musical structure and sound (such as timbre, dynamics, texture, and spatialization) have received less attention. The cultural positioning of music psychology (its domination by Anglo-American researchers) has meant that classical Western tonal music has been the overwhelming focus of attention, and investigations of the musics of other cultures have usually been somewhat superficial – and virtually always motivated by the kind of cross-cultural comparison of which ethnomusicologists are often understandably suspicious. It is all to easy for a comparison of Western listener behavior with, for example, Javanese listeners to start off with deeply rooted ethnocentric assumptions (about the nature and function of listening, for instance) which then ensure that a similarly ethnocentric “result” will be found. The same broad problem often applies to investigations of the music of sub-cultures that are geographically much closer to home (pop and jazz), but which may also involve radically different basic assumptions and kinds of behavior.
The concentration on cognition meant that for a long time emotion and meaning in music remained virtually an untouched subject. The argument for this was that people’s emotional responses to music, and what music might mean to them, were so unpredictable and idiosyncratic, and so dependent on personality, or biographical and contextual factors, that it was simply impossible to make progress in that direction in any systematic or empirically defensible fashion. Only more recently has the research community become impatient with this attitude – not only because the “holy grail” of understanding how people pick up and represent structure never seemed to get any nearer, but also because the foundational commitment to a structuralist approach has been seriously questioned on more fundamental grounds. Research on emotion in music, in relation to both listening and performing, has now become a much more active area, as have the related themes of embodiment, gesture, meaning, and the functions of music in everyday life.
These developments have brought about a convergence between music psychology, ethnomusicology, and the sociology of music (Cook 2008), but with significantly different agendas and conceptual frameworks, allowing substantially different questions to be addressed. Take, for example, the case of jazz musicians playing together. From a broadly sociological/ethnomusicological perspective, the primary focus of interest here might be the ways in which those musicians talk about their experiences, how they construct their own sense of identity and musical value within that context, descriptions of the kinds of interactions that can be observed between them in performance, and perhaps an analysis of the power and authority structures that control those interactions. By contrast, music psychologists have been more concerned with trying to understand how it is that performing musicians in this kind of improvising context can control the time-course and specific content of their interactions from the point of view of sensorimotor control and communicative interaction, and what they are specifically doing to produce, for instance, a sense of “groove,” or a “laid back” feel, and how that might be affected by context and intention. There is a complementarity between these kinds of approach, and connecting threads between these different views of common ground are starting to emerge in relationships between music psychology, ethnomusicology, the sociology of music, anthropology, archaeology, and ecology (e.g. Clarke 2005; Miell, MacDonald and Hargreaves 2005; Mithen 2005).
One of the blindspots of earlier psychology of music was a rather stark desocialization of its subject matter – a tendency to treat musical behavior as the cognitive skills of an individual listener, performer or composer. In part, this reflects a dominating view within older musicology and music theory in which music is seen in a distinctly abstracted and autonomous light: organized sound in time. This view of music fitted rather too neatly with the ways in which music might be investigated in a laboratory context, which for most of the twentieth century was how psychological research was generally carried out. In part this can be attributed to the grip that a positivist empiricism, based on laboratory methods and hypothesis testing, has had on music psychology and psychology more generally – and perhaps the discipline’s desire to associate itself with the prestige of the natural sciences. Since this dominant paradigm had such a powerful impact on what was regarded as the appropriate subject matter, it is important to have some sense of what the typical methods used in music psychology have been.
Not surprisingly in the light of its history, music psychology has inherited many of its methods from psychology generally, and experimental cognitive psychology more specifically. The cognitive revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s was as much a revolution in methods as anything else, and many of these were imported directly into music research. Typical laboratory studies involve the presentation of controlled musical materials to individual participants (“subjects”) who are required to judge items on numerical scales of various kinds, to indicate whether pairs of items are the same or different, to judge whether a specific chord in a sequence is in tune or not (the speed at which the judgment is made acting as an indicator of various kinds of cognitive processing); or in a method developed by Carol Krumhansl and known as the “probe-tone technique” (Krumhansl 1990), to judge how well a single note fits with various kinds of prior context. Studies of musical performance have usually tried to capture specific aspects of what performers do in controlled but reasonably realistic ways. Detailed studies of the timing, dynamics, articulation, and physical movements of skilled musical performances, using numerical data extracted from recordings of one kind or another, and analyzed using standard statistical methods can investigate a whole range of research questions about expression, emotion, communication, and style change.
There are some significant advantages to carrying out this kind of quantitative research: the data are clearly defined, the methods are well established, the principles are widely known and accepted in the general scientific community, and the analytical techniques are readily available in standard computer software. Nonetheless, there are limitations: many kinds of musical behavior are complex and continuous and cannot easily be reduced to the discrete judgments that quantitative research typically requires. If the aim is to investigate listeners’ fluctuating emotional responses to music, for example, then it can be hard to design a realistic study that produces neat, quantitative data. There have been attempts to capture more continuous quantitative data – for instance, by asking listeners to move a computer mouse around so as to convey their changing emotional response to music – but it is equally likely that a researcher will ask participants to talk freely about what they heard, or keep a written or spoken diary of their listening and responses to music over a significant period of time. These are qualitative data – potentially rich and complex statements that cannot be reduced to points on a scale – and they present different challenges and opportunities to the researchers that use them.
Until the 1990s, qualitative research was regarded as the poor relation of its more hard-nosed quantitative counterpart, but qualitative research is now more widely accepted and correspondingly more methodologically developed. There are accepted ways to analyze qualitative data that provide frameworks within which to analyze complex and often messy qualitative data (spoken language, diaries, open-ended interviews, video images) with a degree of system and rigor. Social and developmental psychology have always been much more ready to use a qualitative approach, often combined with quantitative methods of the kind that are typically found in questionnaires. If you are interested in finding out about teenagers’ musical preferences, for example, it is likely that you will both want to talk to some teenagers in an informal and open-ended way and, perhaps, send out a questionnaire to a much larger sample to get some kind of overview. The interviews will yield qualitative data (recorded conversations), and the questionnaires might produce quantitative data, if the questions ask for ratings, or multiple-choice answers.
Certain kinds of research necessarily require the use of rather specialized methods, and working with young, preverbal infants is one such example. Even very young infants have been found to turn to look at objects or events they find interesting, and to suck faster on a dummy. With equipment that can monitor direction of gaze or sucking rate, researchers have been able to investigate the music perceptual capacities and preferences of infants that are days or even just hours old.
Finally, research into music and neuroscience requires particularly specialized methods and equipment. The various kinds of brain-imaging techniques, such as Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Magneto-encephalography (MEG), and Electro-encephalography (EEG), are different ways of monitoring how much activity is going on in different areas of the brain in more or less direct ways. All of these techniques have their own particular strengths and weaknesses, determining the kinds of study in which they can be used. Some are extremely invasive for the participant, who may have to lie with his or her head completely engulfed by what looks like a very large and noisy tumble dryer. The information that can be gathered about different regions of brain activity is potentially fas- cinating, and rapid advances have been made since the 1990s in what is known about general (as well as musically specific) brain functioning; but it is obviously very hard under these physical circumstances to involve people in anything like realistic musical activities.
This highlights a pervasive problem in music psychology research: the balance between realism and control, sometimes expressed as the question of ecological validity. Musical experiences are often complex, time varying, context-dependent, individually variable, and easily disrupted by extraneous interventions; and are embedded in historical processes, cultural circumstances, value systems, and the complex mediations of technology and material culture. Some, such as The-odor Adorno (1948: 32–3), have concluded that an effective psychology of music is simply not possible. A more optimistic and constructive conclusion might recognize that a full account of the human engagement with music cannot possibly be framed within one disciplinary context, however hybrid that discipline, but that an account that excludes any consideration of human psychology must be fatally inadequate.
See also Ethnomusicology (Chapter 49), Music and language (Chapter 10), Music education (Chapter 56), Music, philosophy, and cognitive science (Chapter 54), Phenomenology and music (Chapter 53), Sociology and cultural studies (Chapter 51), and Understanding music (Chapter 12).
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