Music Perception and Cognition: A Review of Recent Cross-Cultural Research

Cultural constraints on music perception and cognition.

Research suggests that music, like language, is both a biological predisposition and a cultural universal. While humans naturally attend to and process many of the psychophysical cues present in musical information, there is a great - and often culture-specific - diversity of musical practices differentiated in part by form, timbre, pitch, rhythm, and other structural elements. Musical interact...

Music Perception and Cognition

Music perception and cognition is the area of cognitive psychology devoted to determining the mental mechanisms underlying our appreciation of music, and in this chapter we review the major findings. We begin with the perception and cognition of pitch, which is the most thoroughly researched area in the field. We then consider perceptual organization in music in the dimension of time, followed ...

Music Perception and Cognition

Cross-cultural Similarities and Differences in Music Mood Perception

Prior research suggests that listeners from different cultural backgrounds appreciate music differently. Although music mood/emotion is an important part of music seeking and appreciation, few cross-cultural music information retrieval (MIR) studies focus on music mood. Moreover, existing studies on crosscultural music perception often only compare listeners from two cultures, in most cases, We...

A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Perception of Emotion in Music: Psychophysical and Cultural Cues