Music cognition

Music cognition is an interdisciplinary field involving such disparate areas as cognitive science, music theory, psychology, musicology, neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, etc. The field aspires to account for the underlying mental processes that occur when people listen to music or perform music.

Overview
Music cognition clearly came to be recognized as a discipline in the early 1980's, with the creation of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition 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. Topics in the field include (but are not limited to):


 * 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 response
 * Expressive, musical performance

Introductory Reading

 * 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.

Intermediate Reading

 * Dowling, W. Jay and Harwood, Dane L. (1986) Music Cognition. San Diego: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-221430-7.
 * Sloboda, John A. (1985) The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-852128-6.

Journal Articles

 * Cross, Ian (1998). "Music Analysis and Music Perception." Music Analysis 17(1).
 * Honing, Henkjan (2006). "Computational modeling of music cognition: a case study on model selection." Music Perception] 23(3).
 * Huron, David (1999). "Music and Mind: The foundation of cognitive musicology (The 1999 Ernst Bloch Lectures)" "Berkeley, University of California Press" "1999"