Music, Thought, and Feeling

Last updated
Music, Thought, and Feeling: Understanding the Psychology of Music
Music, Thought, and Feeling.jpg
First edition
Author William Forde Thompson
LanguageEnglish
Publisher Oxford University Press
Publication date
2008
ISBN 978-0-19-537707-1
781/.11 22
LC Class ML3830 .T496 2009

Music, Thought, and Feeling: Understanding the Psychology of Music is a book written by psychologist William Forde Thompson and published in 2009 by Oxford University Press. The 2nd edition was published in 2014.

Contents

Reviews

In July, 2009, Victoria Williamson reviewed the book for Psychology of Music (Volume 37, Number 3). Williamson wrote "Music, Thought, and Feeling definitely fills a gap in the current literature. It is an excellent and, I am sure, extremely welcome resource for anyone who is planning a course on music cognition, either at undergraduate or graduate level. This is thanks to the combination of accessible and engaging language, clear structure, and relevant and illustrative resources. The demeanour of the book is one that assumes no specific artistic or scientific background: Just a desire to engage with the modern issues of music cognition." [1]

In his 2009 review of the book for Musicae Scientiae (Volume 13, Number 2), Tuomas Eerola wrote "Music, Thought, and Feeling is an important pedagogical contribution to the field as it not only manages to pull together the strings of the last thirty years of research from a broad range of topics within music cognition, but it performs this in a highly accessible format, and written in an enthusiastic and analytic style."

In his 2009 review for the journal Music Perception, Edward Large (Florida Atlantic University) wrote: "Music Thought and Feeling is a really great textbook. What it does best is capture the great variety of our field, deftly weaving together theory and empirical results into a compelling narrative that provides a unique snapshot of our discipline and a time of unprecedented expansion. ... [It is] a well conceived and attractively produced work that surveys our field as it is practiced today, and in a way that is compelling ..." [2]

Related Research Articles

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Consciousness Sentience or awareness of internal or external existence

Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience or awareness of internal and external existence. Despite millennia of analyses, definitions, explanations and debates by philosophers and scientists, consciousness remains puzzling and controversial, being "at once the most familiar and [also the] most mysterious aspect of our lives". Perhaps the only widely agreed notion about the topic is the intuition that it exists. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied and explained as consciousness. Sometimes, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of it. In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition. Today, it often includes some kind of experience, cognition, feeling or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, or self-awareness either continuously changing or not. There might be different levels or orders of consciousness, or different kinds of consciousness, or just one kind with different features. Other questions include whether only humans are conscious, all animals, or even the whole universe. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises doubts about whether the right questions are being asked.

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Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.

Concept Mental representation or an abstract object

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Music psychology

Music psychology, or the psychology of music, may be regarded as a branch of both psychology and 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 music psychology 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. Music psychology is a field of research with practical relevance for many areas, including music performance, composition, education, criticism, and therapy, as well as investigations of human attitude, skill, performance, intelligence, creativity, and social behavior.

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William Forde "Bill" Thompson is an academic who has worked in Canada, Sweden and Australia. He is a distinguished professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, where he was chair of the psychology department between 2009 and 2013. His research focuses on music, emotion, expertise, and performance.

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David Huron

David Huron is a Canadian Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor at the Ohio State University, in both the School of Music and the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. His teaching and publications focus on the psychology of music and music cognition. In 2017, Huron was awarded the Society for Music Perception and Cognition Achievement Award.

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References

  1. Victoria Williamson (July 2009). "Book review: WILLIAM FORDE THOMPSON, Music, Thought, and Feeling: Understanding the Psychology of Music" (PDF). Psychology of Music. 37 (3): 371–374. doi:10.1177/0305735609339477. S2CID   144509561.
  2. Edward W. Large. "Book review: WILLIAM FORDE THOMPSON, Music, Thought, and Feeling: Understanding the Psychology of Music". Music Perception. 27 (2). doi:10.1525/mp.2009.27.2.145.