Table of Contents

PREFACE ; CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ; LEARNING OUTCOMES ; Overview of Book Contents ; Abiding Controversies ; Recent Areas of Research Growth ; Additional Readings ; CHAPTER 2: ORIGINS OF MUSIC ; LEARNING OUTCOMES ; Prehistoric Music ; Adaptationist Accounts ; Theories Based on Reproductive Benefits ; Theories Based on Survival Benefits ; Nonadaptationist Accounts ; Precursors to Music ; Additional Readings ; CHAPTER 3: MUSICAL BUILDING BLOCKS ; LEARNING OUTCOMES ; The Elements of Sound ; Periodic Motion ; The Discovery of Music Within Sound ; Sensory Consonance and Dissonance ; Tuning Systems ; Sensitivity to Pitch ; Models of Pitch Perception ; Absolute Pitch ; Timbre ; Reconstructing Music ; Additional Readings ; CHAPTER 4: MUSIC ACQUISITION ; LEARNING OUTCOMES ; Musical Infants ; Music in the Womb ; Investigating Music Perception Among Infants ; Melodic Contour ; Consonance and Dissonance ; Pitch Relations ; Scale Structure ; Phrase Structure ; Harmony ; Key ; Rhythm ; Memory for Music ; Learning and Enculturation ; Additional Readings ; CHAPTER 5 : PERCEIVING MUSIC STRUCTURE ; LEARNING OUTCOMES ; Arrangements of Sound ; Relative Pitch ; Melodic Contour ; Scale Structure ; Large-Scale Structure ; Melodic Expectancies ; Implicit Memory for Music ; Implied Harmony ; Musical Key ; Implied Key ; Rhythm ; Additional Readings ; CHAPTER 6: MUSIC AND EMOTION ; LEARNING OUTCOMES ; Emotion Work ; Emotion and Cognition ; Theories of Music and Emotion ; Empirical Studies ; Do Listeners Agree on the Emotional Meaning of Music? ; How Do Listeners Respond Emotionally to Music? ; Compositional and Expressive Signals of Emotion ; What Properties of Music Lead to an Emotional Response? ; Is There a Universal Link Between Music and Emotion? ; Sources of Emotion in Music ; Additional Readings ; CHAPTER 7: MUSIC AND THE BRAIN ; LEARNING OUTCOMES ; What's in a Brain? ; The Search for Music Inside the Brain ; Neurological Disorders ; Techniques of Neuroimaging ; Neuroimaging and Music ; A Rapidly Evolving Field ; Additional Readings ; CHAPTER 8: PERFORMING MUSIC ; LEARNING OUTCOMES ; Playing Music ; Acquiring Performance Skill ; Communicating Musical Structure ; Communicating Emotional Meaning ; Singing ; Improvising ; Gestures and Facial Expressions ; Evaluating Performance ; The Craft of the Performer ; Additional Readings ; CHAPTER 9: COMPOSING MUSIC ; LEARNING OUTCOMES ; The Radius of Creativity ; Composers and Listeners ; Cognitive Constraints on Composition ; Composing with Multiple Voices ; Where Do New Ideas Come From? ; The Craft of Music Composition ; CHAPTER 10: MUSIC AND OTHER ABILITIES ; LEARNING OUTCOMES ; Is Music Unique? ; Short-Term Effects of Music ; Long-Term Benefits of Music ; Educational Implications ; Additional Readings ; GLOSSARY ; REFERENCES ; AUTHOR INDEX ; SUBJECT INDEX

About the Author

William Forde Thompson is Professor of Psychology at Macquarie University, where he conducts research on music, emotion, and performance. He is President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (2006-2008), Associate Editor at Music Perception, and Editor of Empirical Musicology Review.

Reviews

"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."--Tuomas Eerola, University of Jyv]�skyl]�, Finland, from a review in Musica Scientiea, vol. XIII(2), Fall 2009"[Music, Thought, and Feeling introduces] a number of select but important questions that face music cognition researchers and then [evaluates] key contributing studies. . . . All the major topic areas are covered with the same degree of care and attention, making this the most successful 'general' textbook in the field that I have come across. . . . It is an [excellent resource] for anyone who is planning a course on music cognition, either at the undergraduate or graduate level [...] thanks to [its] accessible and engaging language, clear structure, and relevant and illustrative resources. [The book] assumes no specific artistic or scientific background: Just a desire to engage with the modern issues of music cognition."--Victoria Williamson, Goldsmiths University of London, from a review in Psychology of Music, vol. 37, July 2009"I had a chance to use this book in the classroom and was hooked. It is the best music cognition textbook on the market, is up to date, and a real joy to read. It is well-explained enough to be used as independent reading for anyone who wants to learn more about the field (not just college students enrolled in a course). The author, William Forde Thompson, is widely regarded as one of the leading researchers in the field, a world class scholar whose own research has covered a range of topics from The Mozart Effect, to the neural basis for musical behaviors, to musical memory, musical emotion, music & film, and musical structure."--Daniel Levitin, McGill University I love this book and find myself referring to it often. I recommend it very highly. Music, Thought, and Feeling stands on its own as a first introduction to the field.