Syllabus

This page includes a calendar of lecture topics.

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 2 hours / session

Prerequisites

Neural Coding and Perception of Sound (HST.723J) or permission of instructor. The course will be as self-contained as possible. We will introduce the musical, physical, mathematical, psychological, and neuroscience concepts we need as we go along. Coverage of topics will begin with concrete musical listening examples, discuss the results of systematic psychological studies, and then delve into possible neural representations and mechanisms.

Format

Lecture plus demonstrations and discussions.

Texts

Required

Deutsch, D., ed. The Psychology of Music. 2nd ed. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1998. ISBN: 9780122135651.

  Handel, S. Listening: An Introduction to the Perception of Auditory Events. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. ISBN: 9780262081795.

Levitin, D. This Is Your Brain On Music. New York, NY: Dutton Adult/Penguin, 2006. ISBN: 9780525949695.

  Snyder, B. Music and Memory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780262194419.

Recommended

Aello, R., ed. Musical Perceptions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780195064759.

McAdams, S., and E. Bigand. Thinking in Sound: The Cognitive Psychology of Human Audition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN: 9780198522584.

Moore, B. C. J. An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing. 5th ed. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780125056281.

Coursework and Grading

General Themes

I group the themes we will cover in terms of Quality and Form, Memory and Anticipation, Codes and Computations, Parallels with Speech and Language, Emotion and Meaning, Psychological Functions, and Origins. We will look at each of these themes in terms of several perspectives: the structure of sound, the perceptual psychology of hearing, our own internal experiences of sound and music, music theory and practice, the neuroscience of the auditory system and the brain at large, computational neuroscience and neural networks, and the psychology of perception, cognition, memory, and emotion.

Quality and Form involves how we distinguish different musical sounds: pitches, timbres, consonances, musical intervals, chords, melody, and rhythmic patterns. Some of the questions we will address involve how we perceive the basic elements and patterns of music: How do we distinguish pitches? When do sound-objects stand apart or fuse together? What pitches do we hear when a chord is sounded? Why do octaves sound similar? What are the acoustic and perceptual dimensions of timbre? How do we recognize melodies? Why do we perceive transposed melodies as being similar, essentially identical? How are individual events and their rhythmic organization perceived?

Memory and anticipation involves how we experience sounds in the context of others that came before. Music unfolds over time on several timescales, from subtle differences in expressive timing to note-transitions to melodies and tonal centers to larger, longer structures of repetition and change. This involves memory and anticipation on many levels - echoic memory, working memory, and long term memory. How do tonal and rhythmic expectations arise? What is their neural basis? How are temporal expectations created and violated? How does music exploit them? To what degree are these expectations universal and to what degree are they the result of cultural conditioning?

Codes and computations concerns the neural processes that subserve our experience of music. How does the auditory system represent sounds? How (and why) are pitches at the fundamentals of harmonic complexes heard? What kinds of neural representations and information processing operations are involved? We will examine different neural codes and computations that are based on activation of specific subsets of neurons (channel codes and connectionist networks) and on patterns of spikes (temporal codes and neural time delay/timing networks). How does the nervous system carry out these operations? How much of the structure of music arises directly from the neural codes in the auditory system? How much arises through learned associations and modification of synaptic connections? What kinds of neural net models have been proposed to explain various aspects of musical experience? What kinds are possible? What assumptions underlie high-level, neurological models of music's various psychological functions?

Parallels and differences between music, speech, and language explores similarities and differences between music and speech sounds on one hand, and music and language structure on the other. Although the same auditory system subserves both music and speech perception, music and speech typically utilize different sets of acoustic contrasts as primitive features (e.g. tonal music depends on pitch relations, while (nontonal) languages use phonetic elements based on timbral distinctions such as vowel spectra, attack, spectral flux). Can a comprehensive model of auditory tonal quality (timbre) account for the salient distinctions that phonetic systems utilize?

Emotion and pleasure are essential parts of musical experience. We create and listen to music for our own pleasure. Why is music pleasurable in the first place? How is tension created and relieved? Why (how) is "expressive timing" expressive? Why does music (sometimes) have profound effects on our emotions? What is the neural basis of these effects? What areas of the brain are involved in emotion and meaning in music? How can highly artificial, highly unnatural structurings of sound have meaning for us? Are they tied to mechanisms/habits related to speech perception? Is musical meaning dependent on previous experience and cultural associations, or does it (also) emulate internal body-rhythms associated with our emotions?

Psychological functions of music involve the way that music is used by individuals and groups to achieve different ends. Music can be used for mood control, auditory-cognitive interest, meditation and stress reduction, dance, distraction, symbolic ritual, expression of self- and collective identity, evocation of feelings of nostalgia, religious awe, patriotism, anger, hate, joy, love, and sorrow. Different types of music lend themselves to particular psychological functions, and different psychological functions presumably engage different neuronal circuits and processes in the brain. To which uses one puts music may be a function of one's personality and culture. What would a full-blown neurologically-grounded theory of personality and music preference look like?

Origins concerns how we as a species and as individuals come to be able to deal with the highly complex structure of music. This can arise from evolutionarily-primitive general-purpose mechanisms, recent evolutionary adaptations, and/or associations/connections acquired in development. Is music perception and cognition parasitical on speech reception and language comprehension mechanisms or are there more general faculties for handling temporal patterns, sequences, and associations that support both music and language cognition? What are the similarities and differences between music and language? Is the perception of music a recently evolved capability (and if so, why), or is it based on basic perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that are much more ancient? Do animals apprehend musical structure in some meaningful sense? Do they derive pleasure from it? What dimensions of music perception and cognition would we predict are likely to be shared by other species? How do infants perceive music, how does this change over time?

Since this course is focused on perception and cognition, there are many aspects of the psychology of music that we will deal with only tangentially: e.g. music and personality, music and cultural identity, musical talent and creative genius. If there is sufficient interest in these areas (as well as others), we will organize space to address them.

Calendar