cognitive neuroscience of music

A fascinating read for non-medical layman and allied health field professionals, this unique book on neuroscience goes beyond discussions on the morphology and physiology of the brain by presenting the central nervous system as what it is: not only a group of neurons and lobes, but an extremely complex, integrated system responsible for an extraordinarily wide scope of functions. “Holistic” in approach, it integrates data from the realms of basic sciences, psychology, psychiatry, and neurology – covering a significant amount of updated subject matter plus material rarely found in standard neuroanatomy and neurophysiology texts – such as drug abuse, nutrition, brain plasticity, dreaming, consciousness, and aggression. Presents a witty, conversational and captivating narrative, interjecting discussions of complex concepts with humor, anecdotes, philosophical discussions and clinical case studies. For professionals in such allied health fields as nursing, social work, psychology, and the rehabilitation disciplines, including physical, occupational, recreational and speech and language therapies.

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What can neuroscience contribute to the psychodynamic understanding of creativity and the imagination?

A Curious Intimacy is an innovative study into the interrelation between art and neuro-psychoanalysis which significantly narrows the divide between the humanities and the sciences.

Situating our grasp of the creative mind within the historical context of theories of sublimation, Lois Oppenheim proposes a change in paradigm for the study of the creative process, questioning the idea that creativity serves, above all, the reparation of early object relationships and the resolution of conflict. The book is divided into two parts. Part One, Art and the Brain, introduces the field of neuro-psychoanalysis and examines the contribution it can make to the discussion of gender and art. Part Two, A New Direction for Interdisciplinary Psychoanalysis, draws on the verbal and visual artistry of Samuel Beckett, Paul Klee and Martha Graham to put to the test the proposed new direction for applied psychoanalysis. Lois Oppenheim concludes by addressing the future of psychoanalysis as it becomes increasingly informed by neuroscience and raising questions about what the neurobiology of emotion and feeling has to tell us about the creative experience of an individual and what might constitute a ‘neuro-psychoanalytic aesthetics’.

A Curious Intimacy will have great appeal for all those interested in the study of imagination and creativity. It will also be of particular interest to students across the humanities and sciences and to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts wanting to explore the contribution that neuro-psychoanalysis can make to our understanding of the creative process.

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What is it that allows human beings to think the way we do? What enables us to communicate with one another through the use of speech? Is the difference between Homo sapiens and other apes simply a matter of degree or are we unique and discontinuous from other species? Michael C. Corballis argues that this century-old debate lies in the fact that humans are the only primates that are predominantly right-handed, a sign of the specialization of the left hemisphere of the brain for language. He attributes humans’ unique abilities to a biological mechanism in the left hemisphere of the brain called a “generative learning device” or GAD. The GAD, Corballis contends, enables us to generate a limitless number of forms and meanings from a few parsed elements, providing the basis for language and manufacture as well as mathematics, reasoning, art, music, and play. Surveying the current views of evolution using evidence from archeology, linguistics, neurology, and genetics, Corballis takes us on a fascinating tour of the origins and implications of the structure of the human brain accounting for the dominance of humanity over all species.

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Listening combines broad coverage of acoustics, speech and music perception psychophysics, and auditory physiology with a coherent theoretical orientation in a lively and accessible introduction to the perception of music and speech events.Handel treats the production and perception of music and speech in parallel throughout the text, arguing that their production and perception follows identical principles; music and speech share the same formal properties, involve the same cognitive mechanisms, and cannot exist in separate “modules.” The way that a sound is produced determines the physical properties of the acoustic wave. These properties in turn lead to the perception of the event.The initial chapters take up physical processes, including a section on characterization of sound and discussion of the way instruments and speech produce musical sound. Handel explains how the environment affects perceived sounds, including reflection, reverberation, diffraction, and the Doppler effect. Subsequent chapters take up psychological processes: partitioning smeared sounds into discrete events, identifying sound sources, the units and phrases of speech and music, and speech and music rhythms. The final chapter provides a detailed treatment of the physiology and neurophysiology of the auditory system.All of the author’s explanations are coherent and clear, and this strategy includes discussing particular pieces of research in detail rather than covering many things superficially Handel analyzes causes as well as describing phenomena and sets out for the reader the difficulties inherent in the research methods he discusses. He defines the physical, musical, and psychological terms used, even the most basic ones, and covers all of the experimental methods and statistical procedures in the text.Stephen Handel is Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee. A Bradford Book.

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 to spontaneously invent stylistically idiomatic compositions on the spot. 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?
In The Improvising Mind, these questions are explored through an interdisciplinary approach that draws on cognitive neuroscience, study of historical pedagogical treatises on improvisation, interviews with improvisers, and musical analysis of improvised performances. Findings from these treatises and interviews are discussed from the perspective of cognitive psychological theories of learning, memory, and expertise. Musical improvisation has often been compared to ‘speaking a musical language.’ While past research has focussed on comparisons of music and language perception, few have dealt with this comparison in the performance domain. In this book, learning to improvise is compared with language acquisition, and improvised performance is compared with spontaneous speech from both theoretical and neurobiological perspectives.
Tackling a topic that has hitherto received little attention, The Improvising Mind will be a valuable addition to the literature in music cognition. This is a book that will make fascinating reading for musicologists, music theorists, cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists, musicians, music educators, and anyone with an interest in creativity.
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The Child as Musician is an authoritative and comprehensive handbook of musical development from conception to late adolescence. Within 24 chapters by leading specialists, it celebrates the richness and diversity of the many different ways in which children can engage in and interact with music.
The 24 chapters have been organized according to five sections:
The first section (Development) 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 (Engagement) scrutinizes claims about the non-musical benefit of exposure to music, for example that music makes you smarter. This is followed by four thorough reviews of dealing with musical preference and taste, literacy, aesthetic identity and the perception of emotion in music.
Section three (Differences) focuses on those issues that help explain and identify individual differences. It includes chapters examining how children develop their motivation to study music, conceptions of giftedness and talent, and two chapters on music therapy. Five chapters cover skills that can develop as a result of exposure to music. It considers the informal activities associated with musical play and the use of computers and technology. There are also chapters dealing with the acquisition of vocal and instrumental skills, as well as the individual and social worlds of children’s musical creativity.
The final section of the book discusses five different contexts: The chapter on historical perspectives provides readers with information that will assist them in making comparisons between how children have learned and developed their musical capacities in the past, with current opportunities. This is extended by two additional chapters that focus on children’s involvement in music in non-western cultures. The book concludes with two chapters focusing on youth musical engagement and the transition from child to adult.
A landmark publication in music education and developmental musical psychology, this is a book that will fascinate both students and researchers – inspiring them to think deeply about the many different ways in which music can affect children’s lives and the quality of life in communities throughout the world.
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The motor actions that can be witnessed as a virtuoso musician performs can be so fast, so accomplished, so precise, as to seem somehow superhuman. The musician has to produce the movements, monitor those they have already made and the subsequent result, co-ordinate their hands, fingers, eyes, and perhaps throat and diaphragm. These achievements are of course the product of hundreds, even thousands of hours of practice – playing scales, studies, time and time again. But those hours of practice by no means guarantee that great musicianship will result. This technical prowess has to be combined with a range of other, perhaps, less tangible qualities.

This book explores the secrets of musical virtuosity. It presents a comprehensive account of music and motor cognition, examining the neural basis of music making – our understanding of which is just starting to be enhanced by brain imaging. It considers the effect on our brains of prolonged music making. It explores the motor processes across a range of instruments (vocal, string, wind, percussion) and within different performance situations. It also considers what happens when things start to go wrong – why motor problems occur in so many professional musicians in later life, and the possible therapies for such problems.

Music is a topic of considerable interest within the brain sciences. With contributions from leading psychologists, neuroscientists, and neurologists, this book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of music and the brain.
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Best review for Music, Motor Control and the Brain

An immensely fascinating look at the origins and evolutionary purpose of human pleasure

From our enjoyment of music to our cravings for chocolate, from our love for children and family to our attraction to things of beauty, this book embarks on an intriguing and accessible exploration of the purpose of pleasure in our lives and in human history. How did pleasure evolve and why? How does it develop in children? How does the pursuit of pleasure play a critical role in brain development? The Pleasure Instinct explores everything we need to know about our urge to feel good.
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Best review for The Pleasure Instinct: Why We Crave Adventure, Chocolate, Pheromones, and Music

The realm of auditory cognition is increasingly being recognized as an important new area of psychological and musicological research, however until now no single work has presented the subject in a comprehensive manner for the benefit of researchers and students. To rectify this situation a special tutorial workshop organized by the French Acoustical Society was held at IRCAM, the music research institute founded by Pierre Boulez. Specialists in perceptual organization, memory, attention, music psychology, neurospsychology, and developmental psychology were invited from Europe and North America. This volume presents the materials from their lectures. The book will be useful to advanced students in the cognitive sciences and scientists specializing in many fields as well as in auditory psychology.
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Best review for Thinking in Sound: The Cognitive Psychology of Human Audition

The increasing prevalence of musical stimulation in our everyday environment makes studies of musical listening, comprehension and memory important.  Music has simply become a pervasive aspect of the experienced environment for most of us; along with enhanced levels of machine sounds, musical sound sources are contributing to a virtual transformation of contemporary soundscapes occurring in many industrial countries. In spite of such trends, arguably the mainstream research in psychology and related fields has been slow to devote concentrated attention to this phenomenon and what it might mean. As a result, with respect to more established fields of research (e.g., visual perception, speech perception, attention and memory etc.), less is known about how people perceive and respond to complex, non-random, acoustic signals found in musical events. Although these topics reside in the domain of music research, this field is a relatively new one, with a history that dates back only about 25 years. Nevertheless, it is now a vibrant and rapidly growing field that draws from multiple disciplines (psychology, psychoacoustics, computer science, music theory, and so forth) to seek answers to questions about how we listen to musical events in our world. It tackles questions about pitch perception in complex patterns, about the role of tonal schemes as well as effects of metrical and rhythmic schemes on musical listening behaviors. It also examines abilities of children and adults to perceive and comprehend dynamic sound patterns. Emotional responses to music are also studied; and overarching all of this are exciting new neuroscience findings concerned with neural responses to musical events. Music Perceptionintroduces its audience to these and related basic issues concerned with listening to music. It also illustrates how knowledge about music perception may ultimately lead to a broader understanding of conventional concepts regarding perception, attention and memory.
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Best review for Music Perception (Springer Handbook of Auditory Research)