Contemporary Music Review, © 1987 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH 1987, Vol. 2 pp. 1-61 Printed in the United Kingdom Photocopying permitted by license only Music: A science of the mind? Stephen McAdams Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, Paris, France (psychologist) There is an increasing interest in psychological studies of music for the advancement of both musical and scientific thought. An historical perspective of psychological considera- tions of music reveals a trend leading from physical thought through theories of sensation and finally up to modern cognitive psychology. What might truly be called the field of music psychology can be shown to exist by an overview of the domains of research covered by contemporary theorists and researchers. Within the framework of cognitive psychology one can demonstrate the importance of mental representation of the various dimensions and structures of music and of organizational processes underlying music listening. The relation between a musical structure and the form that is "accumulated" by a listener depends to a large extent on his or her musical experience within a given culture. A difference in experience may be hypothesized to result from the nature of mental schemata acquired by listeners. A great deal of work is still needed, however, to approach more affective and aesthetic aspects of musical experience. KEY WORDS music psychology, cognition, internal representation, organizational processes, musical form, musical structure. There is one real, and graded, distinction between sciences like the biologies and the physical sciences. The former are unrestricted and their investigator must be prepared to follow their problems into any other science whatsoever. Downloaded By: [McGill University] At: 22:23 22 August 2008 C.F.A. Pantin (1968, p.24) Introduction Music is a fertile ground for the development of thought in the cognitive sciences, but why would a scientist of the mind dare attempt an analysis of the nature of human musical experience? Can there be any realm of collective human production and response more obscure, mysterious and, finally, so absolutely personal and individual? At the same time, can any human science ignore one of the species' most unique capacities? The answer to this last question being an obvious "No!," the question arises of how to,proceed. With current knowledge drawn from the various human sciences, from diverse theories of music and from the speculations of practising 2 Stephen McAdams composers, we must take stock of what we know and what we can formulate as a starring point for a psychology of music. A thorough scientific consideration of musical experience necessitates drawing from many fields including acoustics, psychology, brain sciences, artificial intelligence and music theory. Although, any single researcher or thinker must necessarily limit the scope of his investigations, much of what today calls itself the psychology of music runs the opposite risk of narrowness of focus and lack of appropriate musical culture. There is a need at this point in the development of cognitive explorations into music to have a plan of approach and a vision of the totality with which to judge the relevance of more specific considerations. Included in this global vision is an intimate knowledge of music itself. The study of music has a great deal to offer an understanding of the human mind. The starting assumption of the psychologist of music is that the structure and process of music can indicate the nature of certain mental structures and processes. The study of mental structures and processes is the domain of cognitive psychology, which seeks to understand internal (or mental) representations and the things that these representations allow one to do with music. The nature of the representations is inferred from the ways people listen to, memorize, perform, create and react to music. The psychologist of music seeks the neatest and most economical manner of describing music's structure in a way that most closely resembles the psychological processes by which music is created, reproduced and understood (Sloboda, 1985, p.ll). We may suppose, then, that since music is a uniquely human product, we can logically draw conclusions about the connection between the observed structure of music and the nature of the human mind that produces it to be heard by others. What might these conclusions be, and what do they contribute to a general understanding about human mental activity and about the possibilities of music itself? Another of the underlying beliefs of this endeavour is that psychologi- cal investigation and theory also have something to offer the musical disciplines. There are two main constraints, however: the work must Downloaded By: [McGill University] At: 22:23 22 August 2008 conform to the accepted procedures of scientific investigation and must, as well, succeed in being relevant to the experience of real music and not only limited to that of overly reduced pre- and proto-musical collections of sounds, though these lower-level investigations will always be important in analysing the contribution of various psychological processes to the comprehension of music. I will attempt to demonstrate to both psychologists and musicians the relevance of music psychology for contemporary musical and scientific thought. Starting with an historical perspective that traces psychological considerations of music from the ancient Greeks to modern cognitive psychology, I will then describe some of the main problem areas in the realm of music psychology in order to situate the framework for a more detailed discussion of the two main problems in cognitive science as applied to an understanding of musical experience. These include the mental representation of the dimensions and structures of music, and Music: a science of the mind? 3 the organizational mechanisms underlying the mental processing of musical structures. The aim is to arrive at an understanding of the experience of musical form, as rich or poor as that may be depending on one's previous experience with the music of a given culture. The psychology of music clearly includes more areas of study than are treated in this article, but I have deliberately limited the scope of this volume to reception and processing of musical structure and the experience of musical form. Also, while this article is consciously biased towards the theory of psychological issues, it is balanced by the more specifically musical considerations of my musical colleagues in the other articles of this issue. The cognitive trajectory The history of psychological considerations of music reveals a trajectory from physical thought to sensation, perception and cognition (Figure I).1 The Greeks of the 6th Century BC attempted an integration of the laws of nature with theories of aesthetics. For Pythagoras, there was an important relation of ratios of small numbers between pitches (string lengths) to musical consonance. The apprehension of these ratios was a manifestation of a "higher" sense he called "pleasure-in-proportion." This sense was to be distinguished from the more base senses involved in ordinary perception. The idea was developed by Plato who made a psychological distinction between mere perception and an inbuilt response to proportion and the rhythms of the universe (the harmony of the spheres). This response naturally leads one, he mused, to a state of being where the flux of the base senses is resolved in a higher state of equilibrium. In contemporary times this classical notion of resolution as equilibrium or a state of quiescence has yielded to a more dynamic homeostatic model of perception which takes into account the necessity within an organism of fluctuations around an optimal level. At a physiological level, things must constantly be in a state of flux or the Downloaded By: [McGill University] At: 22:23 22 August 2008 sensory systems cease to respond. The best known example of this is the fact that the eyes constantly make small random movements to keep the image of the environment moving across the retina. If this image is held in tiie same place, by pressing one's finger against the eyeball, for example, it slowly fades away. Similar kinds of "adaptation" or "fatigue" to constant sound stimuli have been shown in auditory perception. What this may imply at a higher, more musical, level is that the tensing and releasing functions in the development of musical ideas may characterize an aesthetic response by first defining a certain "optimal" state, and then departing from and returning to this state as a way of modulating the experienced tension. Another assumption in Pythagorian thought that is implicitly psycho- logical is the notion that there is an identical correspondence between some specific external, or physical, property (string length) and the resulting internal, or perceptual, property (sensation of pitch). This 4 Stephen Me Adams Physicalists Downloaded By: [McGill University] At: 22:23 22 August 2008 "Natural" Psychoaesthetics Psychoacoustics Music Cognition Intonations and Microtonal Systems Figure 1 This diagram represents a possible reading of the historical trajectory of music psychology (with time progressing from top to bottom) from the physically based thought of the ancient Greeks to modern cognitive science. The arrows indicate transitions to subsequent schools of thought and the double bars indicate a rupture. At the bottom are some current areas of systematic or scientific investigation