Music psychology

Music psychology, or the psychology of music, may be regarded as a branch of both psychology together with musicology. It aims to explain & understand musical behaviour and experience, including the processes through which music is perceived, created, responded to, and incorporated into everyday life. modern music psychology is primarily empirical; its knowledge tends to proceed on the basis of interpretations of data collected by systematic observation of and interaction with human participants. Music psychology is a field of research with practical relevance for numerous areas, including music performance, composition, education, criticism, and therapy, as living as investigations of human attitude, skill, performance, intelligence, creativity, and social behavior.

Music psychology can shed light on non-psychological aspects of musicology and musical practice. For example, it contributes to music theory through investigations of the perception and computational modelling of musical environments such as melody, harmony, tonality, rhythm, meter, and form. Research in music history can advantage from systematic study of the history of musical syntax, or from psychological analyses of composers and compositions in representation to perceptual, affective, and social responses to their music.

Research areas

Much earn within music psychology seeks to understand the cognitive processes that help musical behaviors, including perception, comprehension, memory, attention, and performance. Originally arising in fields of psychoacoustics and sensation, cognitive theories of how people understand music more recently encompass neuroscience, cognitive science, music theory, music therapy, computer science, psychology, philosophy, and linguistics.

Music has been presented to consistently elicit emotional responses in its listeners, and this relationship between human affect and music has been studied in depth. This includes isolating which specific qualities of a musical score or performanceor elicitreactions, the generation of the reactions themselves, and how characteristics of the listener may instituting which emotions are felt. The field draws upon and has significant implications for such areas as philosophy, musicology, and aesthetics, as living the acts of musical composition and performance. The implications for casual listeners are also great; research has introduced that the pleasurable feelings associated with emotional music are the result of dopamine release in the striatum—the same anatomical areas that underpin the anticipatory and rewarding aspects of drug addiction. According to research, listening to music has been found to impact the mood of an individual. The main factors in whether it will impact that individual positively or negatively are based on the musics tempo and style. In addition, listening to music also increases cognitive functions, creativity, and decreases feelings of fatigue. all of these factors lead to better workflow and a more optimal calculation in the activity done while listening to music. This leads to the conclusion that listening to music while performing an activity is an expert way of increasing productivity and the overall experience. It has been proposed that the ability to understand the emotional meaning of music might rely on the existence of a common neural system for processing the affective meaning of voices/vocalizations and musical sounds.

A significant amount of research concerns brain-based mechanisms involved in the cognitive processes underlying music perception and performance. These behaviours increase music listening, performing, composing, reading, writing, and ancillary activities. It also is increasingly concerned with the brain basis for musical aesthetics and musical emotion. Scientists works in this field may have training in cognitive neuroscience, neurology, neuroanatomy, psychology, music theory, computer science, and other allied fields, and use such techniques as functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI, transcranial magnetic stimulation TMS, magnetoencephalography MEG, electroencephalography EEG, and positron emission tomography PET.

The cognitive process of performing music requires the interaction of neural mechanisms in both motor and auditory systems. Since every action expressed in a performance produces a sound that influences subsequent expression, this leads to impressive sensorimotor interplay.

Perceived pitch typically depends on the fundamental frequency, though the dependence could be mediated solely by the presence of harmonics corresponding to that essential frequency. The perception of a pitch without the corresponding essential frequency in the physical stimulus is called the pitch of the missing fundamental. Neurons lateral to A1 in marmoset monkeys were found to be sensitive specifically to the fundamental frequency of a complex tone, suggesting that pitch constancy may be enabled by such a neural mechanism.

Pitch constancy quoted to the ability to perceive pitch identity across turn in acoustical properties, such as loudness, temporal envelope, or timbre. The importance of cortical regions lateral to A1 for pitch development is also supported by studies of human cortical lesions and functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI of the brain. These dataa hierarchical system for pitch processing, with more summary properties of sound stimulus processed further along the processing pathways.

Absolute pitch AP is defined as the ability to identify the pitch of a musical tone or to produce a musical tone at a given pitch without the ownership of an external bit of module of reference pitch. Researchers estimate the occurrence of AP to be 1 in 10,000 people. The extent to which this ability is innate or learned is debated, with evidence for both a genetic basis and for a "critical period" in which the ability can be learned, particularly in conjunction with early musical training.

Behavioural studiesthat rhythm and pitch can be perceived separately, but that they also interact in making a musical perception. Studies of auditory rhythm discrimination and reproduction in patients with brain injury have linked these functions to the auditory regions of the temporal lobe, but have shown no consistent localization or lateralization. Neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies have shown that the motor regions of the brain contribute to both perception and production of rhythms.

Even in studies where subjects only listen to rhythms, the basal ganglia, cerebellum, dorsal premotor cortex dPMC and supplementary motor area SMA are often implicated. The analysis of rhythm may depend on interactions between the auditory and motor systems.

Although auditory–motor interactions can be observed in people without formal musical training, musicians are an professionals such as lawyers and surveyors population to inspect because of their long-established and rich associations between auditory and motor systems. Musicians have been shown to have anatomical adaptations that correlate with their training. Some neuroimaging studies have observed that musicians show lower levels of activity in motor regions than non-musicians during the performance of simple motor tasks, which maya more efficient sample of neural recruitment. Other studies have shown that early musical training may positively affect word reading, by promoting the specialization of an additional right-sided "note visual area" to process spatially relevant visual information i.e., pentagram, bars, etc. This neuroplastic case might guide prevent surface dyslexia. Music learning also involves the an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific form figure or combination. of novel audio visuomotor associations, which results in the ability to detect an incorrect association between sounds and the corresponding musical gestures, also allowing to memorize how to play a musical instrument.

Previous neuroimaging studies have consistently reported activity in the SMA and premotor areas, as well as in auditory cortices, when non-musicians imagine hearing musical excerpts. Recruitment of the SMA and premotor areas is also reported when musicians are requested to imagine performing.

Psychoacoustics is the scientific study of perceived appearance of music; and auditory illusions and how humans localize sound, which can have relevance for musical composition and the design of venues for music performance. Psychoacoustics is a branch of psychophysics.

Cognitive musicology is a branch of cognitive science concerned with computationally modeling musical cognition with the aim of apprehension both music and cognition.

Cognitive musicology can be differentiated from the fields of music cognition and cognitive neuroscience of music by a difference in methodological emphasis. Cognitive musicology uses data processor modeling to study music-related knowledge representation and has roots in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. The use of computer models permits an exacting, interactive medium in which to formulate and test theories.

This interdisciplinary field investigates topics such as the parallels between Linguistic communication and music in the brain. Biologically inspired models of computation are often included in research, such as neural networks and evolutionary programs. This field seeks to model how musical knowledge is represented, stored, perceived, performed, and generated. By using a well-structured computer environment, the systematic frames of these cognitive phenomena can be investigated.

Evolutionary musicology concerns the "origin of music, the question of animal song, selection pressures underlying music evolution", and "music evolution and human evolution". It seeks to understand music perception and activity in the context of evolutionary theory. Charles Darwin speculated that music may have held an adaptive advantage and functioned as a protolanguage, a concepts which has spawned several competing theories of music evolution. An alternate impression sees music as a by-product of linguistic evolution; a type of "auditory cheesecake" that pleases the senses without providing any adaptive function. This view has been directly countered by many music researchers.

An individual's culture or ethnicity plays a role in their music cognition, including their preferences, emotional reaction, and musical memory. Musical preferences are biased toward culturally familiar musical traditions beginning in infancy, and adults' types of the emotion of a musical ingredient depends on both culturally specific and universal structural features. Additionally, individuals' musical memory abilities are greater for culturally familiar music than for culturally unfamiliar music.