What is music? There have been so many different definitions of music that the definition of music has its own Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_music). In a sense, music is anything which people choose to regard as music, whether that be John Cage's famously silent 4'33”, Britney Spears, or the bell music of the Ewe people of West Africa. However, most things regarded as music are temporally patterned human activities, which may be social or individual, which involve the production and perception of organized sound, and which do not have a fixed immediate consensual reference (Stevens, 2004) - that is, purposeful sound made and listened to by people, which is not spoken language.

Something which appears to be music is present in some form in every known present and past culture which has been studied (Nettl, 2000), and infants are sensitive to musical information at early ages (e.g., Trehub, Thorpe, & Morongiello, 1987). It has been suggested that the human ability for music is in some way evolved, but it is at present unclear how evolutionary forces have shaped the human perception and production of music (Justus & Hutsler, 2005). There is some relationship between the cognition of language and the cognition of music. Broca's area of the brain has been implicated in the processing of both music and language, and people with congenital amusia (tone-deafness) appear to be equally poor at tasks involving prosody (the suprasegmental structure of speech) and music (Peretz & Hyde, 2003).

There are several different disciplines which study music. Musicology, the reasoned study of music, is a wide-ranging discipline. Traditionally, musicology has concentrated on Western art music. Common subdisciplines of musicology include music theory - for example, Schoenberg's Twelve Tone technique is a music theory underlying serialist music (Ford, 2002) - and historical musicology - for example, the development over time of the Romantic style of music. Ethnomusicology is the study of music with regards to the cultural anthropology of music, and focuses on musical practices in non-Western cultures. Insofar as Western art music is a particular culture of music, traditional musicology has been seen as subdiscipline of ethnomusicology. Zoomusicology is the study of the music of animals, such as birdsong. Other disciplines which involve music include acoustics (e.g., that of the singing voice, musical instruments, and concert halls), algorithmic composition, music education, music engineering (e.g., recording techniques and live sound techniques) and compression techniques (e.g., the MP3 compressed audio format).

Music psychology is the study of the psychological and neural processes underlying the perception, cognition, composition and performance of music. Music psychologists have investigated topics such as the effect of musical training on the perception of music, the evolutionary psychology of music, the relationship between musical training and IQ, musical development in infants, the role of attention and memory in the cognition of music, and the relationship between movement and music (Peretz & Zatorre, 2003). Furthermore, music is a useful tool in the investigation of memory, perception, non-verbal communication, verbal communication, development, emotion, human evolution, and modularity.

References

Ford, A. (2002). Illegal Harmonies. ABC Adult Books: Sydney.

Justus, T., & Hutsler, J. J. (2005). Fundamental issues in the evolutionary psychology of music: Assessing innateness and domain specificity. Music Perception, 23(1), 1-27.

Nettl, B. (2000). An ethnomusicologist contemplates universals in musical sound and musical culture. In N. L, Wallin, B. Merker, & S. Brown, The Origins of Music. MIT Press: Massachusetts.

Peretz, I., & Hyde, K. L. (2003). What is specific to music processing? Insights from congenital amusia. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(8), 362-367.

Peretz, I., & Zatorre, R. J. (eds.) (2003). The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music. Oxford University Press:

Stevens, C. (2004). Cross-cultural studies of musical pitch and time. Acoustical Science and Technology, 25, 433-438.

Trehub, S. E., Thorpe, L. A., & Morrongiello, B. A. (1987). Organizational processes in infants' perception of auditory patterns. Child Development, 58(3), 741-749.

Wikimedia Foundation. (2006, June 13). Definition of music. Retrieved, July 5, 2006, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_music

Summary Written By

Tim Byron

MARCS Auditory Laboratories

University of Western Sydney