PSYC56Music Cognition

• Instructor: Mark A. Schmuckler

• Office: S-515

• Phone: 287-7417

• Email: marksch@utsc.utoronto.ca

• Office Hours: Thur, 1 – 2 PM, or by appointment

• Teaching Assistant: Dominique Vuvan

• Office: H-302

• Phone: 287-7182

• Email: dominique.vuvan@utoronto.ca

• Office Hours: Tues, 1 – 2 PM, or by appointment

• Class Time/Location: Mon, 11 – 1, SY115

• Web:www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~marksch/psyc56/c56-index.htm

PSYC56Music Cognition

• Course Description:• This course studies the perceptual and cognitive processing

involved in the psychology of music. The general idea is to acquaint students with the basic concepts and issues involved in the understanding of musical passages. The focus of this course is on the perception and cognition of musical materials, taking as its starting point the music listener as a gatherer and interpreter of information from the environment. Topics will include aspects such as the basic physical and psychological properties of sound, pitch perception and melodic organization, the perception of rhythm and time, musical correlates of psychological structure, musical performance, emotion and meaning in music, musical development, and so on.

• Course Readings:• Thompson, W. F. (2009). Music, Thought, and Feeling:

Understanding the Psychology of Music. Oxford, UK: Oxford University press

• Additional readings as needed, available as PDFs on the course website

• Course Requirements and Grading:• Midterm (35%) and Final (35%)

• Four take-home assignments (7.5% each)

Introduction to Music CognitionA topical outline of music psychology (Butler, 1992)

Psychoacoustics and Musical Sound•Stimulus properties:

• frequency, duration, intensity, tone partials, envelope characteristics

•Sensory attributes: •pitch, time loudness, volume, timbre•Physics and physiology:•acoustics: sources of sound, propogation of sound;•Physiology/capacity of the auditory system: functions within the auditory system, thresholds, central processes

Musical Ability•“The musical mind”

•performance, creativity, memory, listening

•Relations between musical ability and other psychological characteristics

• intelligence, artistic abilities, abnormalities, prodigies, savants

•Heredity vs. environment •genealogical studies, genius, cross-racial, cross-cultural, development

Musical Systems and Cognition•Structural components:•pitch systems: tuning, intonation, consonance, non-Western systems•timbral attributes•relations of components to extra-musical structure•Musical constructs:•melody, chords, keys, tonality, rhythm and meter, formal parameters, musical universals

Applications•Clinical

•music therapy, music and drugs•Industrial•Educational

•Teaching-learning process, formal training, informal acquisition, development

•Social• socio-economic environment on: development, preference• Influences of music on society, mass culture

Affective Responses to Music•Mood and emotional responses•Extramusial associations•Imagery, synaesthetic responses•Experimental aesthetics

Testing, Experimental Methodology•Reliability and validity•Standardization of measures•Procedural and theoretical issues

• experimental control, ecological validity

What is studied in music cognition?Topic domains for empirical articles in the

journal Music Perception, between 1984 - 2010Tirovolas & Levitin (2011)

Pitch Perception

Temporal Perception

Melodic Perception

Timbre Perception

Musical Memory

Consonance /Dissonance

Performance

Emotion

Development

Measurement

Music & Language

Cross-Cultural

Neural/Brain

Transfer

Studies designed to examine perception of individual sounds or pitches, isolated intervals and/or chords, absolute pitch, pitch encoding, pitch intensityStudies designed to examine the perception of musical time, including rhythm, meter, tempo Studies designed to examine the perception of melody, cadence, tonal patterns, melodic expectancy/contour/mode/key Studies designed to examine the perception and identification of different musical instruments, salience of instrumentation Studies designed to examine memory for isolated musical pitches or pitch sequences, the effect of music a memory aid, music training, and memory ability Studies designed to examine the perception of music as pleasant or unpleasant, including preference judgments, music appreciation, aesthetic judgment, judgment of congruence Studies designed to examine some aspect of musical performance, including rating musical performances, movement, musical sight-reading, musical style, performance ability, music educationStudies designed to examine perception of emotion and meaning in music, the effect of music on mood/arousal Studies designed to examine the development of music perception through infancy, childhood, adolescence Studies designed to examine the utility of a particular instrument in measuring music perception (e.g., re-sponse time, EEG, ERP), development of empirical methodologies, measurements of musical experience Studies designed to examine some aspect of the relationship between music and speech/language, including verbal ability Studies designed to examine music perception from a cross-cultural perspective, including studies that use “non-native” music Studies designed to examine music perception from a neurological standpoint (e.g., fMRI, ERP) Studies designed to examine the effects of music training on cognitive function

Percentage of articles published on various music psychology topics in the journal Music

Perception, between 1984 – 2010Tirovolas & Levitin (2011)

What is studied in music cognition?

Change over time of the percentage of articles on the top five topics in the journal Music

Perception, between 1984 – 2010Tirovolas & Levitin (2011)

What is studied in music cognition?

Departmental affiliations of authors

Tirovolas & Levitin (2011)

Empirical Articles (424 total):

•Psychology Departments: 217

•Music Departments: 108

•Neurosciences: 33

•Haskins Laboratories: 19

•Technology/Computer Science: 17

TheoreticalArticles (154 total):

•Psychology Departments: 30

•Music Departments: 71

•Neurosciences: 10

•Technology/Computer Science: 8

•Cognitive Science: 5

Who studies music cognition?

Who studies music cognition?

External musical Internal experience

stimulus of the listener

Different forms of musical structureObjective Subjective

Musical attributesPsychological

that are perceived experiences corresponding to attributes

Musical attributes Psychological

that are not perceived experiences not

corresponding to

attributes

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P

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Different forms of musical structureObjective Subjective

Who studies music cognition?

• How is it best to study music cognition?

• Inherent problems with integrating two different fields

• Problems with borrowing of ideas

• Making naive assumptions or mistakes

• Potential antipathy to study of field by other discipline

Drawbacks of the interdisciplinarynature of music cognition

Who studies music cognition?

• Empirical approach

• Based on methods of cognitive psychology

• Diverse collection of activities

• Encoding and interpreting perceptual information

• Organizing motor responses

• Limitations and dangers to approach

• How to formulate questions, compile observations, systems to explain results

• Choice of stimulus material

• Problems with use of impoverished materials

• Problems with use of complex musical materials

• Types of behaviors of responses to measure

• Description of internal psychological system; need to employ responses that do not require training

• Observations need to be musically relevant, though

• Choice of listeners in study

• Use of participants with or without musical training

How do you do this type of work?

• History of field

• Roots in 1950s, cognitive revolution and information processing

• Began to see studies of music-related topics

• Work still kept under cover, though

• 1970 – 1980s field began to acquire real legitimacy

• See edited books, 1st specialized journals appear

• Psychomusicology in 1981, Music Perception in 1986

• More frequent music-related articles in general psychology journals

• Advent of specialized conferences, graduate programs

• Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC)

• International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC)

The field of music cognition