A comprehensive survey of the latest neuroscientific research into the effects of music on the brain
- Covers a variety of topics fundamental for music perception, including musical syntax, musical semantics, music and action, music and emotion
- Includes general introductory chapters to engage a broad readership, as well as a wealth of detailed research material for experts
- Offers the most empirical (and most systematic) work on the topics of neural correlates of musical syntax and musical semantics
- Integrates research from different domains (such as music, language, action and emotion both theoretically and empirically, to create a comprehensive theory of music psychology
Preface ix
Part I Introductory Chapters 1
1 Ear and Hearing 3
1.1 The ear 3
1.2 Auditory brainstem and thalamus 6
1.3 Place and time information 8
1.4 Beats, roughness, consonance and dissonance 9
1.5 Acoustical equivalency of timbre and phoneme 11
1.6 Auditory cortex 12
2 Music-theoretical Background 17
2.1 How major keys are related 17
2.2 The basic in-key functions in major 20
2.3 Chord inversions and Neapolitan sixth chords 21
2.4 Secondary dominants and double dominants 21
3 Perception of Pitch and Harmony 23
3.1 Context-dependent representation of pitch 23
3.2 The representation of key-relatedness 26
3.3 The developing and changing sense of key 29
3.4 The representation of chord-functions 30
3.5 Hierarchy of harmonic stability 31