What is music psychology?
Music plays an important role in all human societies. It is an essential component of most rituals, ceremonies and gatherings, whether they be religious, festive, sporting or political. Most people spend considerable periods of time every day listening to music. School children often learn a musical instrument; music is now a compulsory subject in the National Curriculum of England and Wales.
Music affects people's lives in innumerable ways. A piece of music can put you in a good mood, or it can move you to tears. It can make you want to sing and
Dance, or send you into a deep state of relaxation. It can sound orderly or chaotic, consonant or dissonant, interesting or boring, familiar or strange. Music can influence how you spend your money, or even how you vote. It can help you to identify with, or cause you to feel rejected by, a particular social group. Most of all, music profoundly affects the everyday lives of professional musicians.
All these phenomena may be the subject of research in music psychology. Music is of interest to psychologists working on such diverse topics as learning, memory, language, neurophysiology, sensation, perception, behaviour, emotion, skill, intelligence, development, education, sociology, and therapy. Conversely, psychology frequently fascinates musicians, whether theorists interested in the cognition of musical structure, performers and teachers seeking to improve their understanding of practice and performing skills, or musicologists studying the history of music from a sociological perspective.
The field of music psychology has come into its own in the past three decades with the founding of learned societies in various countries, the establishment of highly regarded journals devoted to the systematic study of music psychology, and the advent of regular international conferences on the subject. An overview of recent research in music psychology may be found in journals such as Music Perception or Psychology of Music, or books such as John Sloboda's Exploring The Musical Mind (Oxford, 2004).
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