Psychology of Music (Tan et al., 2010): Chapter 1, The Scope of Psychology of Music

This is the start of another book club series, this time on the 2010 book ‘Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance’ by Siu-Lan Tan, Peter Pfordresher, and Rom Harré. I recently had the privilege of meeting Dr Matthew Rodger at the recently concluded European Workshop for Ecological Psychology in Leeds, and during our late-night discussions, we realised that we shared an interest in auditory perception and music. I later found out that he teaches a Psychology of Art and Music module at Queen’s University Belfast, and this was the textbook he recommended for the course.


A brief aside
 
Combining my interests as an amateur music hobbyist and an ecological psychologist, I always thought it’d be cool to find the informational basis of auditory and music perception, and how we might be able to exploit this for music education and development. To give an example in sports training, one application of the ecological approach is to employ representative learning designs. The basic idea here is that, given perception and action are contingent on the detection of specifying information (i.e., information that has a unique 1:1 mapping to the object of perception, such as action possibilities or affordances), coaches should aim to preserve the information that athletes are exposed to (during competition) within the training session.

For instance, in baseball, the information that regulates the control of the batter’s bat (to hit the ball) is effectively captured in the dynamics of a moving ball. Based on representative learning design, hitting training should largely consist of challenging batters to hit moving balls of all types. On the contrary, hitting a stationary ball off a tee-stand provides no useful informational variable that is used during a performance setting.


Ear training

Let’s apply this now to music practice. One important skill to develop as a musician is to develop a good ear, or more specifically, relative pitch. Having good relative pitch means that, given an initial pitch, one is able to accurately identify the distance a subsequent pitch is from the initial one. So, for example, if I played the first two notes of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow” or the Star Wars theme, you should be able to identify the musical intervals of an octave and a perfect fifth, respectively.
 
This is a really useful skill, especially for learning new songs by ear, improvisation, and just playing with others in general. Now, one popular way of training this skill is by getting people to associate different intervals to specific songs, and then getting them to memorise the interval-song pairing. The idea here is that songs are more memorable, so they help facilitate the learning of different intervals. This is what I did in the past for ear training. For example, I would use the Star Wars theme for an ascending 5^th, the Simpsons theme for an ascending tritone, ‘Misty’ for a descending minor 3^rd, and my personal favourite, “I’ll Close My Eyes” for an ascending minor 7^th. 
 
Now, if you quizzed me on all these intervals, I’m confident that I’d still be able to get them right. The problem is, I’ve done this training out of context and in a very contrived setting. When in a music performance will I ever be asked to verbally call out isolated pairs of pitches? I was getting better at verbally identifying the music intervals, but this wasn’t getting translated into my actual playing or listening skills!
 
I could get into my whole hypothesis on why this happens in this specific case, but I think I’m getting off-track here. The general argument here is that this form of ear training is not representative of how you'd actually use your ears in an actual musical setting! It doesn’t preserve or get musicians to shift their attentional focus to the useful, specifying informational variables, nor does it maintain any action fidelity (i.e., perception-action coupling is not maintained). Think about it, in a representative setting, you’d listen and play in a concurrent loop, the listening serves the playing, and the playing serves the listening. Meanwhile, in this form of ear training, you listen solely to verbally call out musical intervals. 

As a side note, this is why the general advice for aspiring jazz musicians is to play with others. Sure, you could drill licks and comping patterns alone in the shed, but this doesn’t expose you to and teach you to attend to the relevant auditory (and even visual) informational patterns only present when playing in group settings.
 
Phew! So much for explaining my current (and very preliminary) thoughts on music, skill acquisition, and ecological psychology. Let’s actually get down to the details of the book, shall we?
 

Chapter 1 (actually)
 
The authors start by asking us about the distinction between sound and music. All music is sound, but not all sound is music, so what’s the differentiating criterion? One example of something that is clearly a non-musical sound is the annoying drone of a vacuum cleaner. Or is it? Here, the authors point to Malcom Arnold’s Grand, Grand Overture, which included the use of 3 vacuum cleaners as part of the orchestration. Intuitively, it seems that context plays a big part in whether sound can be considered music. I immediately think of collaborative TikTok videos where creators add their own instrumentation to the repetitive sounds of a malfunctioning dryer or a croaking frog, or videos where musicians overlay backing tracks and melodies on someone’s speech. On their own, the dryer, frog, and speaking person are making non-musical sounds. But place them in a different context, and suddenly they become musically entwined with a piece of auditory art!
 
Despite a lack of agreement as to what music constitutes in, the authors argue that there are still some areas in which most people would agree. For instance, music is created and perceived by humans. Additionally, music is a skill – one must invest time and effort to acquire the ability to create these meaningful patterns of sound. Finally, to create music, one must first learn to perceive and appreciate it. This also comes with a fair bit of exposure and training (think about the ear training example from earlier).
 

The scope of the field
 
The authors then move on to the broad areas covered by the study of the psychology of music. Generally, they claim that the psychology of music is interested in studying the processes and mechanisms by which we perceive and create music, and also how music is incorporated into our lives. Here, they outline some of the key areas of the field that will be explored in the book, including: the physical and neural basis of music perception, perceiving elements of music, the development of musical skills, and the socio-emotional significance of music in our lives and across cultures. 
 
The broad focus of the psychology of music invites many different perspectives from experts in varying fields, too! Here, there will be research related to acoustics (the science of how sound vibrations are produced, propagated, and received for hearing), neuroscience (understanding the neural basis of musical experience), musicology (interested in musical structure and history), and ethnomusicology (understanding the link between culture and musical experience).
 

Range of research methods
 
The final part of the chapter simply lists out some of the different paradigms used to study music psychology, such as experimental manipulations, brain imaging techniques, and naturalistic observations. The point here is simply that the answers we get are largely influenced by the methods we employ, and given just how expansive the psychology of music is as a field, researchers have used a range of conceptual perspectives and research methods to better understand musical experience in humans.
 
And that’s all for the first chapter! The authors end by outlining a secondary goal of the book, which I think is quite poignant. Quoting Carl Seashore, an important pioneer of the psychology of music, they hope that the book will help bring readers from a ‘mere love and practice of music to an intelligent conception of it’ (Seashore, 1938, p. xi). I think this is pretty representative of why music is such a cool field to study – it appeals to the artists, the casual listeners, the scientists, and everyone in between. 


References

Seashore, C. E. (1938). The psychology of music. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Tan, S., Pfordresher, P., & Harré, R. (2010). Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BB01824497