HIGHER LEARNING

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnomusicology

Cognition

Cognitive psychology, neuroscience, anatomy, and similar fields have endeavored to understand how music relates to an individual’s perception, cognition, and behavior. This is a relatively new approach to the study of music. Research topics include pitch perception, representation and expectation, timbre perception, rhythmic processing, event hierarchies and reductions, musical performance and ability, musical universals, musical origins, music development, cross-cultural cognition, evolution, and more.

The perception of music has a quickly growing body of literature. Structurally, the auditory system is able to distinguish different pitches (sound waves of varying frequency) via the complementary vibrating of the eardrum. It can also parse incoming sound signals via pattern recognition mechanisms.^[64] Cognitively, the brain is often constructionist when it comes to pitch. If one removes the fundamental pitch from a harmonic spectrum, the brain can still “hear” that missing fundamental and identify it through an attempt to reconstruct a coherent harmonic spectrum.^[65]

Research suggests that much more is learned perception, however. Contrary to popular belief, absolute pitch is learned at a critical age, or for a familiar timbre only.^[66][67] Debate still occurs over whether Western chords are naturally consonant or dissonant, or whether that ascription is learned.^[68][69] Relation of pitch to frequency is a universal phenomenon, but scale construction is culturally specific.^[70] Training in a cultural scale results in melodic and harmonic expectations.^[71]Expectations of timbre are also learned based on past correlations.^[72]

Researchers have also attempted to use psychological and biological principles to understand more complex musical phenomena such as performance behavior or the evolution of music, but have reached few consensuses in these areas. It is generally accepted that errors in performance give insight into perception of a music’s structure, but these studies are restricted to Western score-reading tradition thus far.^[73] Currently there are several theories to explain the evolution of music – that it piggy-backed on the ability to produce language, evolved to enable and promote social interaction,^[74] evolved to increase efficiency of vocal communication over long distances, or enabled communication with the supernatural.^[75]