Music psychology
Contemporary trends
Richard Parncutt
Centre for Systematic Musicology
University of Graz, Austria
SysMus Graz
Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor
4 April 2012
Results of some empirical studies
just to whet your appetite…
Melody: Recognition depends mainly on contour not interval size
contour = the sequence of ups and downs
Harmony: Its perception is based on speech perception
The ear extracts the harmonic series from voiced speech sounds
Emotion: Basic emotions are perceived across cultures
Other musical emotions are culture-specific
Aesthetics: We prefer familiar styles with medium info content
Optimal complexity depends on personality
Sport: Music that you like reduces pain & improves performance
But music with a strong beat may make you run/cycle slower!
Development: “Talent” is mainly learned; audiation is central
audiation = imagining complex pitch-time structures
Contents
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What is music psychology?
Representations of music
History of mp: Then and now
Infrastructures
Leading music psychologists
My research
Musikologie in Graz
Current trends in mp
Music
Musicology
psychology
Psychology
What is music psychology?
Object of research: music
All aspects of musical experience and behavior:
• the “music itself”
– physical/physiological: ear, brain, voice, body
– experiential: sensations, emotions
– abstract: notation, discourses, cognition
• musical agents
– musicians, listeners
– their abilities, development…
Means of research: psychology
– methods, findings, theories
– all subdisciplines
Musical experience and behavior
the object of research in music psychology
• Perception of music
– concerts, recordings, own performance
– listening, reacting, ignoring
• Playing music
– practice, performance, ensemble, interpretation, improvisation
• Writing music
– transcription, composition, arrangement, analysis
• Imagining music (audiation)
– reconstruction, association, invention
• Selecting music
– preference, rejection, aesthetics
• Moving to music
– dance, gesture
Subdisciplines of psychology
all subdisciplines contribute to music psychology
• Biopsychology (incl. neuropsychology)
– brain, motor control, voice
• Cognitive psychology
– sensation, perception, learning, memory
– language, thinking, consciousness
– motivation, emotion
• Developmental psychology
– life span from prenatal to old age
• Health psychology
– stress, coping, therapy
• Personality and differential psychology
– talent, creativity, intelligence
• Social psychology
– social cognition, group behavior, gender
Reality according to Karl Popper
His “three worlds”
1. Physical world (matter and energy)
2. Experience (sensations, emotions)
3. Information and knowledge
…but what about…
4. Agents (souls, consciousnesses)?
 4 different representations of
(i) music
(ii) people
SysMus Graz
 4 different areas of music psychology?
1. Music psychology in the physical world
related to music acoustics and music physiology
Music physiology:
Assumption: behavior & experience depend on physiology
Aspects: ear, brain, voice, motor control
Behavioral psychology:
Assumptions:
• behavior, thinking & feeling are learned
• learning is observable (stimulus-response paradigm)
– Pavlov: classical conditioning
– Skinner: operant conditioning
2. Music psychology & subjective experience
related to music theory, analysis, semiotics, cultural studies
• Consciousness - what we are aware of
– ultimate source of all knowledge?
• Subjectivity and intersubjectivity
– object and subject of research are not separate
– we perceive the subjectivity of other people (empathy)
• Research paradigms
– qualitative (based on language, not numbers)
– holistic (not analytic or reductionist)
3. Music psychology and information
Cognition
• information processing in living organisms
• “mental processes” in the brain
• underlies experiences in World 2
Music cognition
• mental processes support musical behaviors
– perception, comprehension, memory, attention, performance
• interdisciplinary basis
– neuroscience, music theory, computing, philosophy, linguistics
4. Music psychology and agency
• People, groups, and their intentionality
– basis of behavior and experience?
• Social psychology of music
– Are social interactions the origin and basis of music?
Music psychology & other psychologies
music as a way of understanding…
• Biopsychology (incl. neuropsychology)
– brain, motor control, voice
• Cognitive psychology
– sensation, perception, learning, memory
– language, thinking, consciousness
– motivation, emotion
• Developmental psychology
– life span from prenatal to old age
• Health psychology
– stress, coping, therapy
• Personality and differential psychology
– talent, creativity, intelligence
• Social psychology
– social cognition, group behavior, gender
Music psychology & other musicologies
potential for future research
• Music history
– history of musical syntax and perception
– psychology of composers and their music
• Ethnomusicology
– cross-cultural music psychology
– comparative musicology
• Music theory, analysis, composition
– perception and cognition of musical structure
• Music performance
– application of psychology in performance
History of music psychology
German roots in late 19th and early 20th Centuries
Franz Brentano, Christoph von Ehrenfels, Gustav
Theodor Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz, Erich
Moritz von Hornbostel, August Knoblauch, Ernst
Kurth, Robert Lach, Theodor Lipps, Ernst Mach,
Alexius Meinong, Hugo Riemann, Carl Stumpf,
Richard Wallaschek, Wilhelm Wundt…
Example: Is perceived consonance based on smoothness
(lack of roughness; Helmholtz) or fusion (Stumpf) or both?
The dominance of empirical methods
in modern (music) psychology
At the International Conference of Music Perception and Cognition
(ICMPC, Sapporo, Japan, 2008)
about ¾ of the presentations focused on empirical studies and data analysis:
Other 9
Demo 13
Review 22
Theoretical
42
“other” =
Empirical
and data
oriented 265
methods,
pedagogy,
software
development,
analysis…
Data in empirical (music) psychology
Forms of systematic observation in empirical research
Quantitative (numbers)
e.g. rating scales (subjective):
How much do you like this music on a scale from 1 to 7?
e.g. behavioral observation (objective):
How often you actually listen to this music?
 statistical analysis to address random variations,
individual differences, context effects, serial order…
Qualitative (words)
e.g. interview: Why you like this music? (subjective)
e.g. ethnography, participant observation, focus group…
 text analysis, e.g. grounded theory, conversation
analysis, discourse analysis, thematic analysis,
interpretative phenomenological analysis…
Quantitative vs qualitative data
in music psychology: examples from timbre perception
Quantitive: 3D-summary of
similarity ratings of pairs of
timbres (from McAdams et al.)
Qualitative: Categorization of
words used to describe timbre of
jazz vocalists (Daniela Prem,
current doctoral dissertation)
Words used by all 6 participants:
open, bright, classical, airy,
vibrato
Words used by 5 out of 6:
pressure, fixed/firm, breathy,
clear, forceful, loose, nasal,
natural, pressed, harsh,
smoky, spoken, full
Modern infrastructures of music psychology
the biggest subdiscipline of systematic musicology?
• International Conference on Music Perception and
Cognition (ICMPC)
– every two years since 1989 in different countries
– 300-400 active participants (≈half students)
– many other smaller conferences (SMPC, ESCOM, etc.)
• Peer-reviewed journals founded in the 1980s
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Music Perception; Psychomusicology (USA)
Jahrbuch Musikpsychologie (D)
Psychology of Music (GB)
Musicae Scientiae (B)
Journal of New Music Research (B; mainly computing)
• Peer-reviewed journals founded since 2000
– Musica Humana (Korea)
– Music Performance Research (GB)
– Empirical Musicology Review (USA)
Quality control in music psychology
and many other disciplines…
Peer review
• quality control by anonymous international experts
• works best in international language (usually English)
– experts in China, Brazil, Germany, Sweden etc. can review
– promotes intercultural validity; no experts are excluded
A typical procedure
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author/s send/s manuscript to editor of journal
(sub-) editor forwards manuscript to anonymous expert reviewers
(sub-) editor checks reviews are appropriate
(sub-) editor informs author that submission is (i) accepted, (ii)
accepted pending minor/major revisions, or (iii) rejected
• if (ii), (sub-) editor checks revisions  accept/reject
Peer review
Is it really the best form of quality control?
Arguments against peer review:
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It suppresses motivation and creativity!
Reviewers have ulterior motives! (bias)
It permits discrimination by sex, nationality etc!
Great historic papers/books were not reviewed!
But in fact:
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Reviewers give authors good ideas.
Conflicts of interest can be systematically avoided.
Double-blind review avoids discrimination.
Most historic papers/books had no impact at all.
Winston Churchill: Democracy is the worst form of government
except for all those others that have been tried.
You could also say: Peer review is the worst form of academic
quality control except for all those others that have been tried.
Cognitive music psychologists
The queen and king of music psychology today?
Carol Krumhansl (Cornell Univ., USA)
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music, language, emotion
musical pitch and tonality
methods: statistics, mathematics
multidimensional scaling, clustering
John Sloboda (Keele Univ., England)
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music, language, emotion
music performance research
musical skill acquisition
music in everyday life
The queen and king of…
Music psychology in the humanities
Helga de la Motte-Haber (TU Berlin)
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founded modern German music psychology
promotes systematic musicology
documented history of German music psychology
modernist: musical structures need not be audible
Fred Lerdahl (Columbia Univ., New York)
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famous book: Generative theory of tonal music
links music psychology to music theory
applies music theory/psychology in composition
rationalist: musical structures should be audible
The queen and king of…
Psychology of expressive performance
Caroline Palmer (McGill, Canada)
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speech and language
expressive piano performance
rhythm perception and performance
motor control
Bruno Repp (Haskins Labs, CT)
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speech and language
expressive piano performance
rhythm perception and performance
motor control
The queen and king of…
Neuropsychology of music
Isabelle Peretz (Université de Montreál)
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biological foundations of music
neural organisation of music
music and emotion
neural correlates of amusia
Robert Zatorre (McGill, Montreal)
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neural processing of music and speech
auditory spatial processes
cross-modal plasticity
anatomy of auditory cortex
hemispheric asymmetries
Perception of musical structure
• Harmony and tonality
– psychological role of the harmonic series in every voiced speech sound
– Historical versus perceptual origins
– Prediction of roots and tonics
• Rhythm and meter
– Psychological role of isochronous patterns in heartbeat and walking
– Historical versus perceptual origins
– Prediction of the downbeat
Synergizing contrasting epistemologies
Humanities and sciences
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Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology
Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies
Research and education/ practice
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The science and psychology of music performance
Epistemology
• What is knowledge?
• Which knowledge exists?
• How is knowledge acquired?
Origin of music and mother-infant bond
Prenatal classical conditioning
• sound patterns (voice, heart, breath, feet, stomach…)
• shared emotional states
Postnatal operant conditioning
• sound patterns evoke prenatally experienced emotions?
• motherese, play  ritual?
Problems:
• What is “prenatal emotion”?
• Can a causal link be demonstrated?
• Evaluation of theories or music’s origin
Music, identity, migration
with Angelika Dorfer and Martin Winter
Music in everyday life
Active versus passive “musicking”
Music and the construction of group identities
Music and feeling at home in a new environment
Modulation of tempo, dynamics,
articularion just before and after
accents using a computer model
Expression in piano music
with Erica Bisesi
Bachelorstudium Musikologie Graz
Schwerpunkt Musikpsychologie und Akustik
Sem
1
2
LV
Introduction to Systematic Musicology
Einführung in die musikalische Akustik
Einführung in die Musikpsychologie
ECTS
3
3
3
3
Digitale Klangverfahren und Klanganalyse
4
4
Empirische Musikpsychologie
Musikpsychologische Datenanalyse
Music Psychology
Musikalische Akustik
Psychoacoustics and music cognition
Research colloquium
4
3
5
5
5
2
5
6
Music psychology: Current trends
Interdisciplinarity
Hot topics
Ethnomusicology
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non-western musics
Historical musicology
historical context
Sociology
social context
Qualitative psychology
methods
Systematic musicology
acoustics, sociology, neuroscience,
computing, philosophy
Practice
education, performance,
medicine, therapy
Brain and behavior
Emotion
Amusia
Evolution
Gesture, movement, dance
Entrainment
Music and language
Improvisation
Development
Health and wellbeing
Institutionalisation
 a normal part of
musicology and psychology?
Music psychology: The future
big questions without clear answers (yet)
• Why do humans spend so much time, effort,
and money on musical activities?
• Is the (natural) scientific research paradigm
appropriate for studying human culture?
• Can music psychology research shed light on
– human values?
– human identity?
– human nature?
Centre for Systematic Musicology
Uni Graz, Austria
Bernd Brabec
Ethnomusicology
Erica Bisesi
Expression in piano music
Andreas Gaich
Cognition Early Polyphony
Martin Winter
Music and identity
Daniela Prem
Timbre in Jazz
Lina Dornhofer
Applied Interculturality Res.