Music psychology Contemporary trends Richard Parncutt Centre for Systematic Musicology University of Graz, Austria Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor.

Music psychologyContemporary trends

Richard ParncuttCentre for Systematic Musicology

University of Graz, Austria

Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor4 April 2012

SysMus Graz

Results of some empirical studiesjust to whet your appetite…

Melody: Recognition depends mainly on contour not interval sizecontour = 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 culturesOther musical emotions are culture-specific

Aesthetics: We prefer familiar styles with medium info contentOptimal complexity depends on personality

Sport: Music that you like reduces pain & improves performanceBut 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

• 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

Musicology Music psychology

Psychology

What is music psychology?

Object of research: musicAll 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 behaviorthe 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 psychologyall 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 PopperHis “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

4 different areas of music psychology?SysMus Graz

1. Music psychology in the physical worldrelated to music acoustics and music physiology

Music physiology:Assumption: behavior & experience depend on physiologyAspects: 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 experiencerelated 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 psychologiesmusic 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 musicologiespotential 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 psychologyGerman 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:

Empirical and data

oriented 265

Theoretical 42

Review 22

Demo 13

Other 9

“other” = methods, pedagogy, software development, analysis…

Data in empirical (music) psychologyForms 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– 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 psychologyand 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• 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 reviewIs it really the best form of quality control?

Arguments against peer review:1. It suppresses motivation and creativity!2. Reviewers have ulterior motives! (bias)3. It permits discrimination by sex, nationality etc!4. Great historic papers/books were not reviewed!

But in fact:5. Reviewers give authors good ideas.6. Conflicts of interest can be systematically avoided.7. Double-blind review avoids discrimination.8. 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 psychologistsThe queen and king of music psychology today?

Carol Krumhansl (Cornell Univ., USA)• music, language, emotion• musical pitch and tonality• methods: statistics, mathematics• multidimensional scaling, clustering

John Sloboda (Keele Univ., England)• 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)• 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)• 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)• speech and language• expressive piano performance• rhythm perception and performance• motor control

Bruno Repp (Haskins Labs, CT)• speech and language• expressive piano performance• rhythm perception and performance• motor control

The queen and king of…

Neuropsychology of musicIsabelle Peretz (Université de Montreál)• biological foundations of music• neural organisation of music • music and emotion• neural correlates of amusia

Robert Zatorre (McGill, Montreal)• neural processing of music and speech• auditory spatial processes • cross-modal plasticity• anatomy of auditory cortex • hemispheric asymmetries

• 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

Perception of musical structure

Synergizing contrasting epistemologies

Epistemology•What is knowledge?•Which knowledge exists?•How is knowledge acquired?

Humanities and sciences• Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology• Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies

Research and education/ practice• The science and psychology of music performance

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, migrationwith Angelika Dorfer and Martin Winter

Music in everyday lifeActive versus passive “musicking” Music and the construction of group identitiesMusic and feeling at home in a new environment

Expression in piano musicwith Erica Bisesi

Mod

ulati

on o

f tem

po, d

ynam

ics,

ar

ticul

ario

n ju

st b

efor

e an

d aft

er

acce

nts

usin

g a

com

pute

r mod

el

Bachelorstudium Musikologie GrazSchwerpunkt Musikpsychologie und Akustik

Sem LV ECTS

1 Introduction to Systematic MusicologyEinführung in die musikalische Akustik

33

2 Einführung in die Musikpsychologie 3

3 Digitale Klangverfahren und Klanganalyse 4

4 Empirische MusikpsychologieMusikpsychologische Datenanalyse

43

5 Music PsychologyMusikalische Akustik

55

6 Psychoacoustics and music cognitionResearch colloquium

52

Music psychology: Current trends

InterdisciplinarityEthnomusicology

non-western musicsHistorical musicology

historical contextSociology

social contextQualitative psychology

methodsSystematic musicology

acoustics, sociology, neuroscience, computing, philosophy

Practiceeducation, performance, medicine, therapy

Hot topics• 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 futurebig 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 MusicologyUni Graz, Austria

Bernd BrabecEthnomusicology

Erica BisesiExpression in piano music

Daniela PremTimbre in Jazz

Martin WinterMusic and identity

Andreas GaichCognition Early Polyphony

Lina DornhoferApplied Interculturality Res.