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t. e. Music psychology, or the psychology of music, may be regarded as a branch of both psychology and musicology. It aims to explain and understand musical behaviour and experience, including the processes through which music is perceived, created, responded to, and incorporated into everyday life.
Music psychology or the psychology of music may be regarded as a branch of both psychology and musicology. It aims to explain and understand musical behavior and experience, including the processes through which music is perceived, created, responded to, and incorporated into everyday life.
- Elements of Music
- Music Production and Performance
- Music and Language
- Musician vs. Non-Musician Processing
- Gender Differences
- Handedness Differences
- Musical Imagery
- Emotion
- Memory
- Attention
Pitch
Sounds consist of waves of air molecules that vibrate at different frequencies. These waves travel to the basilar membrane in the cochlea of the inner ear. Different frequencies of sound will cause vibrations in different locations of the basilar membrane. We are able to hear different pitches because each sound wave with a unique frequency is correlated to a different location along the basilar membrane. This spatial arrangement of sounds and their respective frequencies being processed in t...
Melody
Studies suggest that individuals are capable of automatically detecting a difference or anomaly in a melody such as an out of tune pitch which does not fit with their previous music experience. This automatic processing occurs in the secondary auditory cortex. Brattico, Tervaniemi, Naatanen, and Peretz (2006) performed one such study to determine if the detection of tones that do not fit an individual's expectations can occur automatically. They recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in non...
Rhythm
The belt and parabelt areas of the right hemisphere are involved in processing rhythm. Rhythm is a strong repeated pattern of movement or sound. When individuals are preparing to tap out a rhythm of regular intervals (1:2 or 1:3) the left frontal cortex, left parietal cortex, and right cerebellum are all activated. With more difficult rhythms such as a 1:2.5, more areas in the cerebral cortex and cerebellum are involved. EEG recordings have also shown a relationship between brain electrical a...
Motor control functions
Musical performance usually involves at least three elementary motor control functions: timing, sequencing, and spatial organization of motor movements. Accuracy in timing of movements is related to musical rhythm. Rhythm, the pattern of temporal intervals within a musical measure or phrase, in turn creates the perception of stronger and weaker beats. Sequencing and spatial organization relate to the expression of individual notes on a musical instrument. These functions and their neural mech...
Certain aspects of language and melody have been shown to be processed in near identical functional brain areas. Brown, Martinez and Parsons (2006) examined the neurological structural similarities between music and language. Utilizing positron emission tomography (PET), the findings showed that both linguistic and melodic phrases produced activati...
Differences
Brain structure within musicians and non-musicians is distinctly different. Gaser and Schlaug (2003) compared brain structures of professional musicians with non-musicians and discovered gray matter volume differences in motor, auditory and visual-spatial brain regions. Specifically, positive correlations were discovered between musician status (professional, amateur and non-musician) and gray matter volume in the primary motor and somatosensory areas, premotor areas, anterior superior pariet...
Similarities
Studies have shown that the human brain has an implicit musical ability. Koelsch, Gunter, Friederici and Schoger (2000) investigated the influence of preceding musical context, task relevance of unexpected chords and the degree of probability of violation on music processing in both musicians and non-musicians. Findings showed that the human brain unintentionally extrapolates expectations about impending auditory input. Even in non-musicians, the extrapolated expectations are consistent with...
Minor neurological differences regarding hemispheric processing exist between brains of males and females. Koelsch, Maess, Grossmann and Friederici (2003) investigated music processing through EEG and ERPs and discovered gender differences. Findings showed that females process music information bilaterally and males process music with a right-hemis...
It has been found that subjects who are lefthanded, particularly those who are also ambidextrous, perform better than righthanders on short term memory for the pitch.It was hypothesized that this handedness advantage is due to the fact that lefthanders have more duplication of storage in the two hemispheres than do righthanders. Other work has show...
Musical imagery refers to the experience of replaying music by imagining it inside the head. Musicians show a superior ability for musical imagery due to intense musical training. Herholz, Lappe, Knief and Pantev (2008) investigated the differences in neural processing of a musical imagery task in musicians and non-musicians. Utilizing magnetoencep...
Music is able to create an intensely pleasurable experience that can be described as "chills". Blood and Zatorre (2001) used PET to measure changes in cerebral blood flow while participants listened to music that they knew to give them the "chills" or any sort of intensely pleasant emotional response. They found that as these chills increase, many ...
Neuropsychology of musical memory
Musical memory involves both explicit and implicit memory systems. Explicit musical memory is further differentiated between episodic (where, when and what of the musical experience) and semantic (memory for music knowledge including facts and emotional concepts). Implicit memory centers on the 'how' of music and involves automatic processes such as procedural memoryand motor skill learning – in other words skills critical for playing an instrument. Samson and Baird (2009) found that the abil...
Neural correlates of musical memory
A PET study looking into the neural correlates of musical semantic and episodic memory found distinct activation patterns.Semantic musical memory involves the sense of familiarity of songs. The semantic memory for music condition resulted in bilateral activation in the medial and orbital frontal cortex, as well as activation in the left angular gyrus and the left anterior region of the middle temporal gyri. These patterns support the functional asymmetry favouring the left hemisphere for sema...
Therapeutic effects of music on memory
Musical training has been shown to aid memory. Altenmuller et al. studied the difference between active and passive musical instruction and found both that over a longer (but not short) period of time, the actively taught students retained much more information than the passively taught students. The actively taught students were also found to have greater cerebral cortex activation. The passively taught students weren't wasting their time; they, along with the active group, displayed greater...
Treder et al.identified neural correlates of attention when listening to simplified polyphonic music patterns. In a musical oddball experiment, they had participants shift selective attention to one out of three different instruments in music audio clips, with each instrument occasionally playing one or several notes deviating from an otherwise rep...
Mar 12, 2019 · Foundations in Music Psychology: Theory and Research. Peter Jason Rentfrow, Daniel J. Levitin. MIT Press, Mar 12, 2019 - Music - 960 pages. A state-of-the-art overview of the latest theory...
Music psychology offers a different framework. It views music as a product of the human mind. One powerful advantage of this perspective is that psychology has developed a clever set of tools to study cognitive processes implicitly, without requiring people to explicitly report on them.
Dec 3, 2020 · The psychology of music is a subfield of psychology that addresses questions of how the mind responds to, imagines, controls the performance of, and evaluates music.
Oct 4, 2018 · Prelude. We present a view that places our ability to create and appreciate music at the center of what it means to be human. We argue that music is the sounds of human bodies, voices and minds – our personalities – moving in creative, story-making ways.
