Music Psychology - Research Areas

Research Areas

Questions in music psychology are often difficult to answer. It is therefore necessary to subject the research literature to careful quality control procedures. These generally take the form of anonymous expert peer review, which is a standard feature of all leading music-psychological societies, conferences, and journals.

Music psychologists investigate all aspects of musical behavior by applying methods and knowledge from all aspects of psychology. Topics of study include for example:

• Perception of musical sounds
  • Cognitive pathways to emotional perception of music
  • Similarities to perception of vocal expression
• Perception of sound patterns
• Memory for music
• Absolute pitch
• everyday music listening (while driving, eating, shopping, reading...)
• musical rituals and gatherings (religious, festive, sporting, political...)
• the specific skills and processes involved in learning a musical instrument or singing in a choir
• musical behaviors such as dancing and responding emotionally to music
• development of musical behaviours and abilities throughout the lifespan
• the role of music in forming personal and group identities
• preferences: the reasons why we like some music genres and not others
• Social influences on musical preference (peers, family, experts, social background, etc.)
• the structures that we hear within music: melody, phrasing, harmony, tonality, rhythm, meter, danceability, BPM, or quasilinguistic elements such as syntax
• the psychological processes involved in musical performance, including:
  • music reading, including eye movement in music reading
  • improvisation
  • the interpersonal/social aspects of group performance
  • the composition/arrangement of music on paper or with the aid of computers