The Listener

Practically speaking, listening is the primary reason music exists at all. Providing a meaningful sonic experience for others is largely the reason that composers work so hard on their creations and performers enter the stage or recording studio. Human beings’ love of music can be seen in common music listening is in everyday life today. In this respect, it may seem strange to consider “the listener” as a musical role, let alone to regard music listening as a skill that people develop, even to specialized expert levels. Be that as it may, listening is an extremely important topic in the psychology of music. Many people would never consider themselves “musicians” still enthusiastically fill the role of serious listeners. This chapter offers in depth consideration of music listening, beginning with an examination of the processes of human hearing. It addresses the multiple types of listening in which people engage, from hearing music in the background while doing other things to focused listening for the purpose analyzing or evaluating the music heard. Special emphasis is given to music’s capacity to evoke strong emotions in music, sometimes to the point of physiological responses such as tears, shivers, and a racing heart.

Introduction to Music Psychology

Psychology and music can be complementary fields of study. Psychology is the study of the amazing human mind, and music comprises some of people’s most fascinating behaviors. Psychology promotes understanding of people: how they perceive and process the world around them, how they feel emotion, how they learn, and how they can skillfully perform certain behaviors, just to name several areas of interest. Music is made by human beings for human beings. Because people are the most important elements of music, aspiring musicians really cannot optimally advance their craft without considering the insights offered by psychology. This chapter introduces the psychology of music as a field of study. It covers a number of topics, including the cultural nature of music, the contributors to emotionally powerful music experiences, and the acquired skill explanation of musical ability.

THE EFFECT OF MUSICAL GESTURES ON AN AUDIENCE: EXAGGERATED OR DEADPAN GESTURES

In the last two decades the scope of scientific papers related to the study of musical gestures increased enormously thanks to the development of data collection technology. The aim of this paper was to contribute to this topical area of psychology of music through the study of musical gestures during performance, i.e. to explain and systematise the visual experience of the audience when a performer made exaggerated or deadpan gestures during performance. This study was based on the questionnaire research method where examinees rated the performance of two performers by using a scale from 1 to 5. During his performance the first performer made exaggerated gestures, while the other made deadpan ones. The results that we obtained proved that exaggerated gestures disturbed visual experience of the listeners regardless whether they were formally educated in music or not. The results also showed considerable achievements in the domain of musical gestures and could be largely used for both pedagogical and performing purposes.

The psychology of music creation

This study aims to conduct a study on the origins of music creation and its metamorphosis. A parallel is drawn between improvisation and composition, making analogies with other fields such as rhetoric and literature. The two terms incorporate a series of processes, mental structures and a thorough preparation, clear examples found in previous eras, improvisation having a leading place in Baroque and Classicism. The article aims at psychological models encountered in improvisation and composition, creativity being investigated in this context. Improvisation and composition present a series of similarities and differences, being argued by presenting the main theories, which are based on a psychological profile of the individual, carefully studied over the decades. The metaphysics of music and the physical and mental processes that the composer or improviser goes through, have often been associated with other fields of research, such as language, theater, poetry, rhetoric and much more. Their study and presentation have as role the artistic development of the complete musician, whether it is a soloist, composer or improviser.

Emotion

This chapter considers the expression of emotion by music, the most interesting of the relations between music and the emotions. It is written from the dual perspective of Anglo-American philosophy and of musicology. The former focuses on the conceptual analysis of emotion, the latter on the underlying causes of the listeners’ experience. The theories of Stephen Davies and Jerrold Levinson are considered and criticized, and recent work in the psychology of music is examined in the light of the pioneering account of expression from Leonard Meyer. Finally, there is some speculation as to the future of work in this area.

A Consideration of the Relationship Between Music and Collective Identity: From the Viewpoint of Cultural Psychology of Music

The aim of the present study lies in an effort of converging anthropological, ethnomusicological and psychological approach to the relationship between music and collective identity. Music is considered a socio-cultural artifact, which mediates the processes of collective identity construction, and whose function in such process can be multiple. In order to understand the ways in which it is sutured into (in)formal processes of collective (self)identification, we propose simultaneous consideration of various dimensions: cultural, social, political, psychological. Although there already has been interdisciplinary research of the role of music in the emergence of identity, we advocate for a more complementary approach, by a consideration of the psychological accounts, adjusted to the needs of ethno-anthropological analysis. As the most comprehensive theoretical approach, we propose cultural psychology of music. Future empirical research on specific identity processes mediation by music as cultural artifact, should include the analysis of intersecting local and global social trends, aspects of musicological analysis, specificities of psychological development of identity, the role of socio-political strategies of identity formation, and, last but not least, cultural specificity of the community in focus of the research. We find the complexity of the phenomenon in focus to be obligatory for the complexity of the theoretical and methodological approach.

Creating, practicing, and reacting to music: A content analysis of research

Psychology of music, a science of the relations between humans and sound structures, is continuously developing. Given the growing number of publications in this domain, reviews of the literature are of value, as they integrate knowledge, informing and guiding future research endeavors. This article presents the results of a 47-year (1973–2019) content analysis of research on creating, practicing, and responding to music featured in The Psychology of Music journal. The purpose of our study was to identify and describe the themes in research on creating, practicing, and responding to music, indicating which study topics were the most often present in publications. We identified 17 categories of research topics and found that the largest number of publications dealt with predictors of music creating, self-regulated practice, or affective responses to music. Suggestions for developing and bolstering research and practice are provided.

Cross-Cultural Work in Music Cognition

Many foundational questions in the psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has been conducted with Western participants and Western music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as strategies for overcoming differences in assumptions, methods, and terminology. This position paper surveys the current state of the field and offers a number of concrete recommendations focused on issues involving ethics, empirical methods, and definitions of “music” and “culture.”