Music cognition is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the mental processes that support 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, music theory, music therapy, computer science, philosophy, and linguistics.

History[link]

Music cognition clearly came to be recognized as a discipline in the early 1980s, with the creation of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, and the journal Music Perception. The field of music cognition focuses on how the mind makes sense of music as it is heard. It also deals with the related question of the cognitive processes involved when musicians perform music. Like language, music is a uniquely human capacity that arguably played a central role in the origins of human cognition. The ways in which music can illuminate fundamental issues in cognition have been underexamined, or even dismissed as epiphenomenal. However, cognition in music is more and more acknowledged as fundamental to our understanding of cognition as a whole, hence music cognition should be able to contribute both conceptually and methodologically to cognitive science. Topics in the field include the following and others:

• A listener's perception of grouping structure (motives, phrases, sections, etc.)
• Rhythm and meter (perception and production)
• Key inference
• Expectation (including melodic expectation).
• Musical similarity
• Emotional, affective, or arousal response
• Expressive, musical performance
• Conceptual processing ^[1]

Some aspects of cognitive music theory describe how sound is perceived by a listener. While the study of human interpretations of sound is called psychoacoustics, the cognitive aspects of how listeners interpret sounds as musical events is commonly known as music cognition.

In the 1970s, music was studied in the sciences mainly for its acoustical and perceptual properties, in what were then relatively novel disciplines such as psychophysics and music psychology. Music scholars criticized much of this research for focusing too much on low-level issues of sensation and perception, often using impoverished stimuli (e.g., small rhythmic fragments) or music restricted to the Western classical repertoire, as well as a general unawareness of the role of music in its wider social and cultural context. However, the cognitive revolution made scientists more aware of the role and importance of these aspects.

Looking back briefly, twenty years ago music went either completely unmentioned in psychology handbooks or appeared only in a subsection on pitch or rhythm perception. Today it is recognized, along with vision and language, as an important and informative domain in which to study the various aspects of cognition which activate psychic processes, including expectation, emotion, perception and memory, and how they apply to therapy.^[2] The role of music scholars and scientists in this latter research seems to be greater than ever. It could well be that music cognition will evolve into a prominent discipline contributing to our understanding of music just as much as more traditional analytic frameworks.^{[dubious – discuss]}

Research has been conducted into the pathways of emotional perception in the brain in response to music and vocal expression. It has been found that such pathways are inherently similar in that they accurately convey specific emotions, and that certain acoustic cues are specific to certain emotions.^[3]

See also[link]

Related fields[link]

• Cognitive musicology
• Cognitive neuroscience of music
• Psychology of music
• Psychoacoustics

Topics[link]

• Embodied music cognition
• Culture in music cognition
• Music therapy

References[link]

Further reading[link]

Encyclopedia entries[link]

• Palmer, Caroline/Melissa K. Jungers (2003): Music Cognition. In: Lynn Nadel: Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Vol. 3, London: Nature Publishing Group, pp. 155–158.

Introductory reading[link]

• Patel, Anirrudh D. (2010). Music, language, and the brain. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Day, Kingsley (October 21, 2004). "Music and the Mind: Turning the Cognition Key". Observer online.
• Jourdain, Robert (1997). Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination. New York: William Morrow and Company. ISBN 0-688-14236-2.
• Honing, Henkjan (2011). "Musical Cognition. A Science of Listening." New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4128-4228-0.
• Levitin, Daniel J. (2006). "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession." New York: Dutton. ISBN 0-525-94969-0
• Purwins & Hardoon (2009). "Trends and Perspectives in Music Cognition Research and Technology." Connection Science. 21(2-3), 85-88.
• Snyder, Bob (2000). "Music and Memory: an introduction" The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-69237-6.

Intermediate reading[link]

• Deutsch, D. (Ed.) (1999). The Psychology of Music, 2nd Edition.San Diego: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-213565-2.
• Dowling, W. Jay and Harwood, Dane L. (1986). Music Cognition. San Diego: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-221430-7.
• Hallam, Cross, & Thaut, (eds.) (2008). The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Krumhansl, Carol L. (2001). Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514836-3.
• Parncutt, Richard (1989). Harmony: A Psychoacoustical Approach. Berlin: Springer.
• Sloboda, John A. (1985). The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-852128-6.
• Lerdahl, F., and Jackendoff, R. (1996) A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-62107-6.
• Temperley, D. (2004). The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-70105-1.
• Thompson, W. F. (2009). Music, Thought, and Feeling: Understanding the Psychology of Music New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-537707-1.
• Zbikowski, Lawrence M. (2004). Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. Oxford University Press, USA. ISBN 978-0-19-514023-1.
• North, A.C. & Hargreaves, D.J. (2008). The Social and Applied Psychology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-856742-4.

Journal articles[link]

• Cross, Ian (1998). "Music Analysis and Music Perception." Music Analysis 17(1).
• Gur, Golan (2008). "Body, Forces, and Paths: Metaphor and Embodiment in Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Conceptualization of Tonal Space" Music Theory Online 14(1).
• Honing, Henkjan (2006). "Computational modeling of music cognition: A case study on model selection." Music Perception 23(5), 365–376.
• Honing, Henkjan (2012). "Without it no music: Beat induction as a fundamental musical trait." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1252, 85–91.
• Huron, David (1999). "Music and Mind: The foundation of cognitive musicology (The 1999 Ernst Bloch Lectures)" "Berkeley, University of California Press"
• Purwins, Herrera, Grachten, Hazan, Marxer, Serra (2008). Computational Models of Music Perception and Cognition (Part I, Part II) Physics of Life Reviews 5(3), 151-182.
• Deutsch, D. (2010). "Hearing music in ensembles". Physics Today.  PDF Document

External links[link]

• MusicCognition.info - A Resource and Information Center

• Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC)

• European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM)

Henkjan Honing (born 1959, Hilversum, Netherlands) is a Dutch researcher and musician. He is KNAW-Muller professor in music cognition and heads the Music Cognition Group (MCG), part of the Department of Musicology, the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam (CSCA), and the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and conducts research in music cognition using theoretical, empirical and computational methods. The research is supported by grants from the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO: Dutch Science Foundation, 'Foundations of the Humanities' programme) and the European Commission (Sixth Framework IST programme) both in the field of music cognition.

Henkjan is the older brother of the saxophonist Yuri Honing.

Selected studies[link]

Sleeping newborn infant participating in the experiment, the mother of the baby was present during the procedure

• Henkjan Honing (2011): Musical Cognition. A Science of Listening. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.^[1]
• Newborn infants detect the beat in music from István Winkler; Gábor P. Haden; Olivia Ladinig; István Sziller; Henkjan Honing (2009) (abstract) PNAS^[2]
• István Winkler et al., et Henkjan Honing (2009): Newborn infants detect the beat in music, early edition at PNAS (full text, pdf format)^[3]

See also[link]

• Beat induction
• István Winkler

References[link]

External links[link]

• Music cognition research at UvA
• Introduction to music cognition.
• a-ne-na, video
• Reflections
• Additional information to “Newborn infants detect the beat in music”, images and video recording