Perception and Cognition of Music

Perception and Cognition of Music: The Sorbonne Lectures presents revised and updated materials delivered in four distinguished lectures at the Université Paris-Sorbonne and the Université de Montréal, originally published in French. The book bridges the fields of music psychology, music theory, and music analysis by way of a consideration of several aspects of music listening through the lens of cognitive psychology. Auditory grouping processes play a role in organizing the continuous incoming sensory information into events, streams of events, and segments of streams that form musical units. Perceived properties of events and streams depend on how the incoming information is organized. Special attention is given to timbre as an understudied musical parameter, which can be a strong structuring force and form-bearing element in music through orchestration practice. The development of systems of abstract knowledge built on different musical parameters within a given culture focuses on the cognitive processing of pitch systems and structures and their role in the mental representation of hierarchical event structures in listeners' minds. Finally, given that music is a temporal art par excellence, the temporality of music listening is explored through a collaborative project involving a composer, psychologists, and musicologists around the conception and creation of a musical work and the perception and affective response it engenders in a live-concert experiment. Each chapter concludes with elements for reflection to expand the necessary transdisciplinary approach that music scholarship needs.

This text comprises of papers relating to music and mind. It presents a range of approaches from the psychological through the computational, to the musicological. This text comprises of reviews of work relating to music and mind. It presents a range of approaches from the psychological through the computational, to the musicological. The reviews were selected from papers submitted at the Third International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition Liege 1994 to illustrate the wide range of perspectives now being adopted in studying how humans make and respond to music. The book is divided ino five sections. The first part illustrates the role of analysis and ethnomusicology in understanding cultural determinants of musical behaviour. The second part charts what is known about aquisition of musical competence, from pre-birth through to the expert performer. The evidence accumulated about specific areas of the brain which control musical thinking and behaviour is examined in Part Three. The fourth part examines how neurological, behavioural and artificial intelligence approaches are converging to shed light on processes in auditory perception. Finally, Part Five highlights the important developments in how we conceptualize the way in which musical structures are represented in the mind.