October 21, 2004

Music and the Mind: Turning the Cognition Key

Northwestern stands at the fore of a developing discipline — music cognition — that addresses such questions as ‘How does music change the brain?’

By Kingsley Day

You go to a concert with someone you know. You both hear the same music played by the same performers. But when you talk about it on the way out, you wonder if you were at two different concerts.

illustration by John Kannenberg

“Of course there’s an objective reality, but what varies from person to person are the mental processes,” says Richard Ashley, the School of Music’s codirector of graduate studies, associate professor of music cognition and theory, and coordinator of the music cognition program. “Music cognition is about trying to understand the mechanisms — both psychological and physiological — that allow musical experiences to take place.”

Or as music theory and cognition associate professor Robert Gjerdingen puts it, “Music theory traditionally looks at music as something written. Music cognition looks at music as something heard.”

At the intersection of music theory, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience, music cognition is hot — “You can’t read the New York Times for more than two weeks without seeing an article on it,” says Ashley. Exploring the mental processes involved in not only hearing music but also performing, composing, improvising, and even remembering it, the field addresses a host of intriguing questions about the nature of musical experience. How does the mind recognize a piece of music or a musical style? What makes a performance expressive? How is music processed in the brain, and how does it change the brain in the process?

“In a way these aren’t new questions, just a new way of looking at them,” says Ashley, citing sources as far back as Plato. As Gjerdingen details in his chapter “The Psychology of Music” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (2002), the roots of the field go back to the beginnings of modern psychology in the 19th century and Hermann von Helmholtz’s seminal On the Sensations of Tones. The next major figure was University of Iowa psychologist Carl Seashore, whose 1938 book The Psychology of Music is still in print. But the book that “really got us going,” says Ashley, was Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956) by Leonard Meyer — with whom Gjerdingen studied while earning his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.

Psychology is “the dominant paradigm of our time,” explains Gjerdingen. “If there’s a murder trial, you bring in a psychologist. So it only stands to reason that in the field of music we would increasingly begin to explain things psychologically.”

As a distinct discipline, music cognition has only taken shape within the last two decades — with the establishment of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition and the founding of the journal Music Perception, both in 1983, and the first International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition in 1990. And Northwestern is clearly in the forefront of the field — Ashley is the current SMPC president, Gjerdingen recently completed a stint as the editor of Music Perception, and this summer the School of Music hosts the eighth biennial International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition.

Ashley’s ascent in the cognitive world dates to a paper on jazz rubato that he presented at the ICMPC in Montreal in 1996; many called it the hit of the conference. The following year he went to the Netherlands as part of a major music cognition project at the University of Nijmegen. “I came home in the fall of 1997 and said, OK, we can do this at Northwestern,” recalls Ashley. Bernard Dobroski, then dean of the School of Music, arranged for initial funding, and the University Research Grants Committee and the Alumnae of Northwestern provided additional resources. In 1999, with Ashley as organizer, Northwestern hosted the Society for Music Perception and Cognition’s North American conference. “We’ve made ourselves an international leader in a very short span of time,” notes Ashley. “I’m really grateful for the good work that everybody has done and the trust the institution has placed in us.”

The School of Music now has a Music Cognition Lab with equipment for studying the physiological effects of music, including blood flow, temperature, respiration, and even brainwave activity. And the school is in the process of hiring a new faculty member in music cognition, joining Ashley, Gjerdingen, and Peter Webster, associate dean for academic affairs and research, as well as allied faculty such as linguistics professor Janet Pierrehumbert and learning sciences professor Andrew Ortony. “If you’ve got four or five people working in this field, you’re one of the top places in the world,” says Ashley. “We are one of the top places in the world. In the last couple of years we’ve had PhD applications not only from the United States and Canada but from Israel, Turkey, Taiwan, Korea, Croatia, Italy, Germany, Great Britain — we’re a big player.”

Although Northwestern’s formal program in music cognition is less than four years old, graduates are already enriching the field. Among them are Jessica Grahn, who earned bachelor’s degrees in both neuroscience and piano performance in 1999 and is pursuing a PhD at Cambridge University as part of its Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. Stacey Davis, who earned a 1997 master’s and a 2001 PhD in music theory, is now on the music faculty of the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her initial exposure to the field in Ashley’s introductory music cognition course was a revelation; as she recalls, “My subsequent research simply grew out of the topics and projects that I worked on during that course.”

As a major research university, Northwestern is an ideal environment for a field with close ties to so many other academic areas — including psychology, cognitive science, and anthropology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, human development and learning in the School of Education and Social Policy, and communication sciences and disorders in the School of Communication. And the intrinsically cross-disciplinary nature of music cognition makes it a dream field at Northwestern, where “interdisciplinary” is the new watchword. Ashley, Gjerdingen, and Webster hold joint appointments in cognitive science, and Ashley holds an additional appointment in cognitive neuroscience. Even within the music school, the program crosses disciplinary boundaries; Webster also teach music education, and Gjerdingen and Ashley hold appointments in both music cognition and music theory — though Ashley describes himself as a “post-theorist” and Gjerdingen sees music theory as “morphing into music psychology.”

— This article was originally published in the summer 2004 issue of Fanfare, the School of Music magazine.