Brain and Music - Paperback

by Stefan Koelsch (Author)

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

Back Jacket

Making and listening to music engages a large array of psychological processes, including perception, attention, learning and memory, syntactic processing, the processing of meaning, and social cognition. This richness makes music the ideal tool to investigate human psychology and the workings of the human brain, and in recent years neuroscientists have increasingly used this tool to inform and extend their ideas. This book offers a comprehensive survey of the current state of knowledge in the cross-disciplinary field of music psychology.

An expert in his field, Stefan Koelsch establishes basic neuroscientific, music-theoretical, and music-psychological concepts, before presenting the brain correlates of music perception, musical syntax, musical semantics, music and action, and music and emotion.

Koelsch synthesizes all these conceptual threads into a new theory of music psychology. His theory integrates different areas such as music, language, action, and emotion that are traditionally treated as separate domains.

Author Biography

Stefan Koelsch is Professor of Music Psychology at the Freie University Berlin. He is a former post-doctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School, and led an independent Junior Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. His main areas of research are neurocognition of music, music and emotion, and music therapy.