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Although research in music psychology, education and therapy has expanded exponentially in the 21st century, there is something of a ‘black hole’ around which much of the discourse circles: music itself. While writers have largely been occupied with what people think about musical engagement, the little musical analysis that exists has tended to be at a low level compared to the sophisticated non-musical exploration that is present. This highlights the tenuous connection between musical enquiry in the context of the humanities and that occurring within the social sciences, the one exception being the partial intersection of music theory and psychology. Here, however, progress has largely been in one direction, with something of the objectivity that characterizes psychological research reading across to music analysis, and taking the form of what has been called ‘empirical musicology’. This book takes a further, reciprocal step, in which certain of the techniques of empirical musicology (in particular, the author’s ‘zygonic’ theory) are used to inform thinking in the domains of music-psychological, educational and therapeutic research. A new, interdisciplinary sphere of endeavour is sketched out, for which the term ‘applied musicology’ is coined. The book adopts a phenomenological, inductive approach, using the analysis of hundreds of real-life examples of musical engagement and interaction to build new theories of musical intentionality and influence, and to shed new light on our understanding of aspects of music perception and cognition. This book is intended to lay the foundations upon which a new category of interdisciplinary work will be built.

Arts in Health: Designing and Researching Interventions provides a complete overview of how to go about undertaking research and practice in the field of arts in health. Part I explores the context for arts in health interventions, including the history of the use of arts in health and the theoretical and political developments that have laid the foundations for its flourishing. It also considers what ‘arts in health’ encompasses and the range of disciplines involved. Part II examines how to design an arts in health intervention, develop partnerships, and find funding, and considers the sensitivities around working in health care. Part III considers the value of research for the field of arts in health and how to design and undertake a research project. Finally, Part IV provides a fact file of arts in health research and practice, showing how the arts can be applied and the benefits they can bring across a range of medical disciplines. The title is aimed at researchers, practitioners, healthcare professionals, and those interested in learning more about the field.

This book is a handbook of musical development from conception to late adolescence. Within twenty-four chapters it celebrates the richness and diversity of the many different ways in which children can engage in and interact with music. Arranged in five sections, the first section examines the critical months and years from conception to the end of infancy. It looks at how the musical brain develops, ways of understanding musical development, and the nature of musicality. Section two scrutinizes claims about the non-musical benefit of exposure to music, for example that music makes you smarter. Section three focuses on those issues that help explain and identify individual differences. It includes chapters examining how children develop their motivation to study music, and two chapters on children with special needs. Section four covers skills that can develop as a result of exposure to music. The final section of the book discusses five different contexts and includes: a chapter on historical perspectives providing information for making comparisons between how children have learned and developed their musical capacities in the past, with current opportunities; two additional chapters that focus on children's involvement in music in non-Western cultures; and two final chapters focusing on youth musical engagement and the transition from child to adult.

This book celebrates the richness and diversity of the many different ways in which children can engage in and interact with music. It presents theory both cutting edge and classic in an accessible way for readers by explaining research concerned with the development and acquisition of musical skills. The focus is on musical development from conception to late adolescence, although the bulk of the coverage concentrates on the period when children are able to begin formal music instruction (from around age 3) until the final year of formal schooling (around age 18). The 35 chapters are organized according to five sections: Development, Engagement, Differences, Skills, and Contexts. It will also help those who need to defend music education to articulate even more precisely why all children deserve to have access to music throughout their childhood.

Music offers a unique opportunity to understand better the organization of the human brain. Like language, music exists in all human societies. Like language, music is a complex, rule-governed activity that seems specific to humans, and associated with a specific brain architecture. Yet unlike most other high-level functions of the human brain — and unlike language — music is a skill at which only a minority of people become proficient. The study of music as a major brain function has for some time been relatively neglected. Just recently, however, we have witnessed an explosion in research activities on music perception and performance and their correlates in the human brain. This volume brings together a collection of authorities — from the fields of music, neuroscience, psychology, and neurology — to describe the advances being made in understanding the complex relationship between music and the brain. It is a book that will lay the foundations for a cognitive neuroscience of music.

Recent studies in music education have investigated the ways in which different groups construe music and music education, and the ways in which these constructions are culturally bound. This book explores the ways in which the discipline of cultural psychology can contribute to our understanding of how music learning and development occurs in a range of cultural settings, and the subsequent implications of such understanding for the theory and practice of music education. The book opens with an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of a cultural psychology of music education. Ten music education scholars and researchers provide chapters that illustrate the application of this approach to key issues in music education; its theory and practice. These chapters provide opportunities to look more deeply into the practices of music education in order to understand the role culture plays in shaping children's musical learning and thinking, the learning and teaching of music teachers, the formal and informal institutions and structures within and through which learning and teaching occur, and, the intersection of these processes and structures in the development of musical thought and practice.

The book is a collection of the author’s papers from 1970 to 2010, bringing together a body of research currently scattered across a range of journals, or simply no longer available. It includes her first study of Beethoven’s original fingerings, her beginning work with children’s invented notations, close observations and analysis of children in the Laboratory for Making Things, studies of musically gifted children, and the emergent musical development of students in elementary-secondary school and university undergraduate and graduate studies. The observations and research lead to the development of an interactive computer music environment based on and contributing to her pragmatic theory of musical development as a generative process of learning. Unlike other collections, the book is clearly interdisciplinary and strongly practical. It brings together and integrates music theory, research in music perception and music education, performance, cognitive development, artificial intelligence, and procedural composition. Her multi-faceted approach to music theory and music pedagogy is guided throughout by commitment to an understanding and respect for an individual’s natural, creative musical intelligence. This natural competence becomes the formative ground on which to help people of all ages build an ever growing engagement and fascination with the myriad, evolving organic structures of the world’s music.

In this multidisciplinary volume, the capacity of music to express and arouse emotions is explored by musicians and composers, philosophers, musicologists, historians, sociologists, psychologists and neuroscientists. Contributors present new insights and approaches into issues such as; How can an abstract sequence of sounds be so intensely expressive of emotional states? How does music elicit or arouse our emotions? What happens at the physiological and neural level when we listen to music? How do composers and performers practically manage the expressive powers of music? How have societies sought to harness the powers of music for social or therapeutic purposes? The volume presents both theoretical perspectives and in-depth explorations of particular musical works, as well as first-hand reports from music performers and composers. This volume is suited for both academic professionals interested in the latest developments in the field, and students wishing to get an introduction to these fascinating questions.

Since the publication in 1986 of the book The Musical Mind, music psychology has developed as a vibrant area of research, exerting influence on areas as diverse as music education and cognitive neuroscience. This new book brings together twenty-three chapters and reviews on music and the mind, focusing on ideas, interpretation, argument and application rather than on technical issues.

What does it mean to be expressive in music performance in diverse historical and cultural domains? What are the means at the disposal of a performer in various time periods and musical practice conventions? And what are the conceptualizations of expression and the roles of performers that shape expressive performance? For the first time, a wide variety of perspectives are assembled in one volume investigating expressiveness in performance in various styles and cultures, including the ways in which the improvisations of Louis Armstrong, studio-fashioned electronic dance music, and the songs of Bedzan Pygmies can be considered expressive. The volume is unique in combining historical, systematic, computational, and phenomenological approaches to performance, and in including empirical investigations of western and non-western classical music as well as western and non-western popular and folk music. The highlighted conceptualizations and materializations of expressiveness in performance are as diverse as one would hope them to be. More awareness of and focus on oral traditions and player interaction are needed for performance research to break away from the dogma of notation. While this challenges existing methods, computational and empirical approaches are nevertheless not only crucial, but also may become central to furthering our understanding of what makes music performance expressive.

Whereas most of the literature in the psychology of music has focused on the processes involved when listening to music, little has been written about the processes involved in making music. This reissued book brings together figures in music psychology to present studies of the processes by which music is generated. The book looks at the generation of expression in musical performance, the problems of synchrony in ensemble performance, the development of children's song, rehearsal strategies of pianists, improvisational skill in trained and untrained musicians, children's spontaneous notations for music, formal constraints on compositional systems, and compositional strategies of music students.

Music's ability to express and arouse emotions is a mystery that has fascinated both experts and laymen at least since ancient Greece. This book offers an account of this domain. It provides coverage of the many approaches that may be said to define the field of music and emotion, in all its breadth and depth. The first section offers multi-disciplinary perspectives on musical emotions from philosophy, musicology, psychology, neurobiology, anthropology, and sociology. The second section features methodologically oriented chapters on the measurement of emotions via different channels (e.g., self-report, psychophysiology, neuroimaging). Sections three and four address how emotion enters into different aspects of musical behaviour, both the making of music and its consumption. Section five covers developmental, personality, and social factors. Section six describes the most important applications involving the relationship between music and emotion. In a final commentary, the editors comment on the history of the field, summarize the current state of affairs, and propose future directions for the field.

The Handbook of Music, Adolescents, and Wellbeing explores how young people use music to work with emotions, identity construction, and connectedness, drawing on perspectives from music therapy, music psychology, music education, and music sociology. Authors provide examples of how theory and research is applied in the practice of music therapists working with groups of adolescents and individuals in schools, communities, hospitals, and other institutions. Research into music and emotions is synthesized, and theories about music and identity construction are provided. The ways that young people use music for connections is explored with a particular emphasis on technology, as well as traditional face-to-face connectedness. The Handbook is written for those interested in promoting adolescent wellbeing using music.

This book documents the remarkable expansion and growth in the study of musical identities since the publication of our book Musical identities. We identify three main features of current psychological approaches to musical identities, which concern their definition, development, and the identification of individual differences, as well as four main real-life contexts in which musical identities have been investigated, namely in music and musical institutions, specific geographical communities, education, and in health and well-being. This conceptual framework provides our rationale for the structure of the Handbook, which is divided into seven main sections. The first, “Sociological, discursive, and narrative approaches,” includes several general theoretical accounts of musical identities from this perspective, as well as some more specific investigations. The second and third main sections deal in depth with two of the three psychological topics described above, namely the development of and individual differences in musical identities. The fourth, fifth, and sixth main sections pursue three of the real-life contexts identified above, namely “Musical institutions and practitioners,” “Education,” and “Health and well-being.” The seventh and final main section of the Handbook, which we have described as “Case studies,” includes chapters, which look at particular musical identities in specific times, places, or contexts. The multidisciplinary range and breadth of the Handbook’s contents may well reflect the rapid changes that are taking place in music, in digital technology, and in their role in society as a whole, such that the study of musical identity is likely to proliferate even further in the future.

The ability to improvise represents one of the highest levels of musical achievement. An improviser must master a musical language to such a degree as to be able spontaneously to invent stylistically idiomatic compositions in the moment. This feat is one of the pinnacles of human creativity, and yet its cognitive basis is poorly understood. What musical knowledge is required for improvisation? How does a musician learn to improvise? What are the neural correlates of improvised performance? This book explores these questions through an interdisciplinary approach that draws on the study of pedagogical treatises on improvisation, interviews with improvisers, musical analysis of improvised performances, and cognitive neuroscience. Findings from the treatises, interviews, and analyses are discussed from the perspective of cognitive psychological theories of learning, memory, and expertise, as well as data from functional brain imaging studies of improvisation. Pedagogy, learning, and performance in improvisation are explored in a cross-cultural context, demonstrating universal features across a wide variety of musical traditions. Though disparate, these sources provide a convergent picture of the improvising mind, suggesting that musical improvisation draws on some of the very same cognitive processes and neural resources as the more mundane but equally infinitely creative faculties of language and movement. Improvisation therefore provides a new focus for comparisons of music and language cognition: while past research comparing music and language cognition has focused almost exclusively on perception of the two sound systems, the cognitive processes underlying the acquisition and production of music and language have not been systematically explored. Here, learning to improvise is compared with language acquisition, and improvised performance is compared with spontaneous speech from both theoretical and neurobiological perspectives.

The past fifteen years have witnessed an increasing interest in the comparative study of language and music as cognitive systems. Language and music are uniquely human traits, so it is not surprising that this interest spans practically all branches of cognitive science, including psychology, computer science, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and education. Underlying the study of language and music is the assumption that the comparison of these two domains can shed light on the structural and functional properties of each, while also serving as a test case for theories of how the mind and, ultimately, the brain work. This book presents an interdisciplinary study of language and music, bringing together a team of leading specialists across these fields. The volume is structured around four core areas in which the study of music and language has been particularly fruitful: structural comparisons, evolution, learning and processing, and neuroscience. As such it provides a snapshot of the different research strands that have focused on language and music, identifying current trends and methodologies that have been (or could be) applied to the study of both domains, and outlining future research directions.

Consciousness has been described as one of the most mysterious things in the universe. Scientists, philosophers, and commentators from a whole range of disciplines can't seem to agree what it is, or why it is that the whole rich panoply of human experience seems to emerge from a lump of squishy grey matter in our heads. Most agree, though, that consciousness represents a Hard Problem, and consciousness studies has emerged as a quasi-discipline over recent years, as a multidisciplinary discourse seeking to address these and other fascinating and perplexing questions. While the arts and humanities have joined the sciences at the debating table, music has been relatively under-represented-until now. This book redresses this balance. Its twenty chapters offer different takes on issues around music and consciousness, both addressing existing agendas, and introducing new ones. No single view emerges, but what the collection as a whole makes clear is that to understand consciousness we need to do much more than look at brains. Studying music makes it clear that consciousness is as much to do with minds, bodies, culture, and history. The book, which includes several chapters drawing from Eastern philosophies, also provides a corrective to any perception that the study of consciousness is a purely Western preoccupation. In addition to what it says about consciousness, the book also — and perhaps primarily — represents a new configuration of writings about music.

Complementing the 2011 publication Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives, this edited volume of 17 essays is organized into three parts. The chapters in Part I (‘Music, consciousness, and the four Es’) question the assumption that consciousness is a matter of what is going on in individual brains, and investigate the ways in which musical consciousness arises through our embodied experience, is embedded in our social and cultural existence, extends out into world, and is manifested as we enact our relationships with and within it. Part II (‘Consciousness in musical practice’) engages with music as a corporeal and culturally embedded practice, conjoining individuals in the social sphere, and extending consciousness across actual and virtual spaces. The chapters in this part explore composition, improvisation, performance, and listening as practices, and consider how music, a paradigmatic example of meaningful action, reveals consciousness as grounded in doing, as well as being. Part III (‘Kinds of musical consciousness’) considers the nature of consciousness under a wide range of musical situations. The chapters in this part seek to deconstruct any invidious distinction between everyday and altered states of consciousness, suggesting that, through the manifold range of experiences it affords, music discloses consciousness across a phenomenological continuum encompassing multiple modalities. Taken as a whole, the volume exemplifies many fertile ways in which music studies can draw upon and contribute to larger debates about consciousness more generally.

Music pervades everyday life. In so many ways, music marks and orchestrates the ways in which people experience the world together. What is it that makes people want to live their lives to the sound of music, and why do so many of our most private experiences and most public spectacles incorporate — or even depend on — music? This book uses psychology to understand musical behaviour and experience in a range of circumstances, including composing and performing, listening and persuading, and teaching and learning. Starting from ‘real world’ examples of musical experiences, it critically examines the ways in which psychology can explain people's diverse experience of, and engagement with music, focusing on how music is used, acquired, and made in a range of familiar musical contexts. Using a framework of real and imagined musical scenarios, the book draws on a wide range of research in the psychology of music and music education. The book is organized into three central sections. Firstly, it tackles the psychology of playing, improvising, and composing music, understood as closely related and integrated activities. Next, it addresses the ways in which people listen to music, manage their emotions, moods, and identities with music, and use music for therapy, persuasion, and social control. Finally, it considers music in human development, and in a range of more formal and informal educational contexts. The final chapter provides an overview of the history and preoccupations of music psychology as a discipline.

The Musical Mind, published in 1985, was written by the relatively unknown John Sloboda. It made ground-breaking inroads in raising crucial questions relating to music's status as a form of human expression and has become the seminal text in the field of music psychology. The scope of that book was impressive: from music perception to production, embracing topics as diverse as music's origin and the circumstances that encourage its skill acquisition. Musical structure, grouping, and perceptual processing, including memory, were key areas where John Sloboda had made early empirical investigations. Discussion of emotional responses and creative processes were far more inductively written, based on personal experiences. The Musical Mind laid a research agenda in asking those crucial ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions that have since occupied a growing body of researchers from all over the world. Following a quarter of a century after that seminal work, this book celebrates the life and work of John Sloboda whilst taking stock of where the field of music psychology stands 25 years after The Musical Mind first appeared. It reviews key areas of current research in the field. Offering a review of the field of music psychology in the twenty-first century, the chapters here also reflect on how the field has been significantly stimulated by the influential work of John Sloboda.