Music CognitionMT8
Donald A. Hodges · 2019
The central question we address in this chapter is: How do we make sense of musical sounds as we encounter them in real time? As music unfolds over time, we must perceive and understand individual notes and phrases as they connect to even longer units. We must retain important information (main themes, rhythmic patterns, etc.) and as the music progresses, form expectations about what is happening in the music. If we do all these things successfully, we are likely to have both a sense of psychological coherence and an emotional response. Gestalt psychology provides important clues about how we organize sounds into music. Figure-ground relationships and the Law of Prägnanz, with its corollaries of proximity, similarity, common direction, simplicity, and closure have great explanatory power, especially for tonal music. Other key topics in music cognition include auditory scene analysis, musical memory, statistical learning, expectancy theory, tonality, cognition of musical elements (e.g., melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, larger musical forms), cross-cultural comparative research in music, and music and language.