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Biomusicology
Biomusicology is the study of music from a biological point of view. The term was coined by Nils L. Wallin in 1991 to encompass several branches of music psychology and musicology, including evolutionary musicology, neuromusicology, and comparative musicology.Wallin, N. L. (1991): ''Biomusicology: Neurophysiological, Neuropsychological and Evolutionary Perspectives on the Origins and Purposes of Music'', Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press. Evolutionary musicology studies the "origins of music, the question of animal song, selection pressures underlying music evolution", and "music evolution and human evolution". Neuromusicology studies the "brain areas involved in music processing, neural and cognitive processes of musical processing", and "ontogeny of musical capacity and musical skill". Comparative musicology studies the "functions and uses of music, advantages and costs of music making", and "universal features of musical systems and musical behavior".Wallin, Nils L./Björn Merk ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evolutionary Musicology
Evolutionary musicology is a subfield of biomusicology that grounds the cognitive mechanisms of music appreciation and music creation in evolutionary theory. It covers vocal communication in other animals, theories of the evolution of human music, and holocultural universals in musical ability and processing. History The origins of the field can be traced back to Charles Darwin who wrote in his 1881 book '' The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex'': This theory of a musical protolanguage has been revived and re-discovered repeatedly. The origins of music Like the origin of language, the origin of music has been a topic for speculation and debate for centuries. Leading theories include Darwin's theory of partner choice (women choose male partners based on musical displays), the idea that human musical behaviors are primarily based on behaviors of other animals (see zoomusicology), the idea that music emerged because it promotes social cohesion, the idea t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Music
Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all human societies. Definitions of music vary widely in substance and approach. While scholars agree that music is defined by a small number of elements of music, specific elements, there is no consensus as to what these necessary elements are. Music is often characterized as a highly versatile medium for expressing human creativity. Diverse activities are involved in the creation of music, and are often divided into categories of musical composition, composition, musical improvisation, improvisation, and performance. Music may be performed using a wide variety of musical instruments, including the human voice. It can also be composed, sequenced, or otherwise produced to be indirectly played mechanically or electronically, such as via a music box ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bird Vocalization
Bird vocalization includes both bird calls and bird songs. In non-technical use, bird songs (often simply ''birdsong'') are the bird sounds that are melodious to the human ear. In ornithology and birding, songs (relatively complex vocalizations) are distinguished by function from calls (relatively simple vocalizations). Definition The distinction between songs and calls is based upon complexity, length, and context. Songs are longer and more complex and are associated with territory and courtship and mating, while calls tend to serve such functions as alarms or keeping members of a flock in contact. Other authorities such as Howell and Webb (1995) make the distinction based on function, so that short vocalizations, such as those of pigeons, and even non-vocal sounds, such as the drumming of woodpeckers and the " winnowing" of snipes' wings in display flight, are considered songs. Still others require song to have syllabic diversity and temporal regularity akin to the re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cognitive Neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the Biology, biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental processes. It addresses the questions of how cognitive activities are affected or controlled by neural circuits in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both neuroscience and psychology, overlapping with disciplines such as behavioral neuroscience, cognitive psychology, physiological psychology and affective neuroscience.Gazzaniga 2002, p. xv Cognitive neuroscience relies upon theories in cognitive science coupled with evidence from neurobiology, and Computational neuroscience, computational modeling. Parts of the brain play an important role in this field. Neurons play the most vital role, since the main point is to establish an understanding of cognition from a neural perspective, along with the different lobes of the cerebra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zoomusicology
Zoomusicology () is the study of the musical aspects of sound and communication as produced and perceived by animals. It is a field of musicology and zoology, and is a type of zoosemiotics. Zoomusicology as a field dates to François-Bernard Mâche's 1983 book ''Music, Myth, and Nature, or the Dolphins of Arion'' (published in English in 1992), and has been developed more recently by scholars such as Dario Martinelli, David Rothenberg, Hollis Taylor, David Teie, and Emily Doolittle. Zoomusicology is a separate field from ethnomusicology, the study of human music. Zoomusicologists in a wide range of fields including music, semiotics, philosophy and biology conduct zoomusicology research. This is because the field of zoomusicology is so broad and reaches many disciplines. Musician and zoomusicologist Hollis Taylor has conducted an extensive study of the Pied Butcherbird (''Pied butcherbird, Cracticus nigrogularis'') over the past 15 years, including interdisciplinary research with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sociocultural Evolution
Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or social evolution are theories of sociobiology and cultural evolution that describe how Society, societies and culture change over time. Whereas sociocultural development traces processes that tend to increase the complexity of a society or culture, sociocultural evolution also considers process that can lead to decreases in complexity (Social degeneration, degeneration) or that can produce variation or proliferation without any seemingly significant changes in complexity (cladogenesis). Sociocultural evolution is "the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure that is qualitatively different from the ancestral form". Most of the 19th-century and some 20th-century approaches to socioculture aimed to provide models for the evolution of humankind as a whole, arguing that different societies have reached different stages of Social change, social development. The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Psychoacoustics
Psychoacoustics is the branch of psychophysics involving the scientific study of the perception of sound by the human auditory system. It is the branch of science studying the psychological responses associated with sound including noise, speech, and music. Psychoacoustics is an interdisciplinary field including psychology, acoustics, electronic engineering, physics, biology, physiology, and computer science. Background Hearing is not a purely mechanical phenomenon of wave propagation, but is also a sensory and perceptual event. When a person hears something, that something arrives at the ear as a mechanical sound wave traveling through the air, but within the ear it is transformed into neural action potentials. These nerve pulses then travel to the brain where they are perceived. Hence, in many problems in acoustics, such as for Auditory system, audio processing, it is advantageous to take into account not just the mechanics of the environment, but also the fact that both the ear ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Music Psychology
The psychology of music, or music psychology, is a branch of psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and/or musicology. It aims to explain and understand musical behaviour and experience, including the processes through which music is perceived, created, responded to, and incorporated into everyday life. Modern work in the psychology of music is primarily empirical; its knowledge tends to advance on the basis of interpretations of data collected by systematic observation of and interaction with human participants. In addition to its basic-science role in the cognitive sciences, the field has practical relevance for many areas, including music performance, composition, education, criticism, and therapy; investigations of human attitude, skill, performance, intelligence, creativity, and social behavior; and links between music and health. The psychology of music can shed light on non-psychological aspects of musicology and musical practice. For example, it contrib ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Entrainment (biomusicology)
Entrainment in the biomusicological sense refers to the synchronization (e.g., foot tapping) of organisms to an external perceived rhythm such as human music and dance. Humans are the only species for which all individuals experience entrainment, although there are documented examples of entrained nonhuman individuals. Beat induction Beat induction is the process in which a regular isochronous pulse is activated while one listens to music (i.e., the beat to which one would tap one's foot). It was thought that the cognitive mechanism that allows us to infer a beat from a sound pattern, and to synchronize or dance to it, was uniquely human. No primate tested so far—with exception of the human species—can dance or collaboratively clap to the beat of the music. Humans know when to start, when to stop, when to speed up or to slow down, in synchronizing with their fellow dancers or musicians. Although primates do not appear to display beat induction, some parrots do. The most famo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Culture In Music Cognition
Culture in music cognition refers to the impact that a person's culture has on their music cognition, including their preferences, emotion recognition, and musical memory. Musical preferences are biased toward culturally familiar musical traditions beginning in infancy, and adults' classification of the emotion of a musical piece depends on both culturally specific and universal structural features. Additionally, individuals' musical memory abilities are greater for culturally familiar music than for culturally unfamiliar music. The sum of these effects makes culture a powerful influence in music cognition. Preferences Effect of culture Culturally bound preferences and familiarity for music begin in infancy and continue through adolescence and adulthood. People tend to prefer and remember music from their own cultural tradition. Familiarity for culturally regular meter styles is already in place for young infants of only a few months' age. The looking times of 4- to 8-month old ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cognitive Musicology
Cognitive musicology is a branch of cognitive science concerned with computationally modeling musical knowledge with the goal of understanding both music and cognition. Cognitive musicology can be differentiated from other branches of music psychology via its methodological emphasis, using computer modeling to study music-related knowledge representation with roots in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. The use of computer models provides an exacting, interactive medium in which to formulate and test theories. This interdisciplinary field investigates topics such as the parallels between language and music in the brain. Biologically inspired models of computation are often included in research, such as neural networks and evolutionary programs. This field seeks to model how musical knowledge is represented, stored, perceived, performed, and generated. By using a well-structured computer environment, the systematic structures of these cognitive phenomena can be investig ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
