Psychology of Music

The Psychology of Music draws together the diverse and scattered literature on the psychology of music.

It explores the way music is processed by the listener and the performer and considers several issues that are of importance both to perceptual psychology and to contemporary music, such as the way the sound of an instrument is identified regardless of its pitch or loudness, or the types of information that can be discarded in the synthetic replication of a sound without distorting perceived timbre.

Comprised of 18 chapters, this book begins with a review of the classical psychoacoustical literature on tone perception, focusing on characteristics of particular relevance to music.

The attributes of pitch, loudness, and timbre are examined, and a summary of research methods in psychoacoustics is presented.

Subsequent chapters deal with timbre perception; the subjective effects of different sound fields; temporal aspects of music; abstract structures formed by pitch relationships in music; different tests of musical ability; and the importance of abstract structural representation in understanding how music is performed.

The final chapter evaluates the relationship between new music and psychology.

This monograph should be a valuable resource for psychologists and musicians.