Here are 100 books that The Musical Mind fans have personally recommended if you like
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My interest in how music makes sense was first piqued when, as a music student at the Royal Academy of Music in London, I met a blind child who, despite having learning difficulties, could reproduce the most complex music on the piano just by listening. Put simply, he had a better musical ear than I did, as a prize-winning student at a top conservatoire. Since that early experience, I have devoted my life to exploring just how music works (without the need for conceptual understanding) and how teachers can use the universality of music to promote social inclusion.
Reading this book for the first time had a profound influence on the way I think about music. It is the first of the seminal texts written by American musicologist Leonard Meyer in the second half of the twentieth century.
I admire how Meyer fuses psychological concepts with music theory to explain compellingly how music makes sense. Meyer’s writing is clear and accessible, and he uses plenty of musical examples to illustrate the sophisticated concepts that he introduces.
It is a must-read book for those who have ever wondered how music works, conveys meaning, and affects how we feel.
"Altogether it is a book that should be required reading for any student of music, be he composer, performer, or theorist. It clears the air of many confused notions . . . and lays the groundwork for exhaustive study of the basic problem of music theory and aesthetics, the relationship between pattern and meaning."-David Kraehenbuehl, Journal of Music Theory "This is the best study of its kind to have come to the attention of this reviewer."-Jules Wolffers, The Christian Science Monitor
"It is not too much to say that his approach provides a basis for the meaningful discussion of emotion…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
My interest in how music makes sense was first piqued when, as a music student at the Royal Academy of Music in London, I met a blind child who, despite having learning difficulties, could reproduce the most complex music on the piano just by listening. Put simply, he had a better musical ear than I did, as a prize-winning student at a top conservatoire. Since that early experience, I have devoted my life to exploring just how music works (without the need for conceptual understanding) and how teachers can use the universality of music to promote social inclusion.
I would heartily recommend this book to those interested in how musical abilities develop through childhood.
Hargreaves’ text was the first to put the developmental psychology of music on the map, identifying it as an important area of study for the first time and setting the scene for a major area of research in music psychology that continues to this day.
I love the way that Hargreaves combines empirical findings with observations of his own children in action, which makes it an engaging read.
This book sets out the psychological basis of musical development in children and adults. The study has two major objectives: to review the research findings, theories and methodologies relevant to the developmental study of music; and to offer a framework within which these can be organised so as to pave the way for future research. It describes the relationship between thinking and music, and discusses the relationship between thinking and music in pre-schoolers and schoolchildren in areas such as singing, aesthetic appreciation, rhythmic and melodic development, and the acquisition of harmony and tonality. The book describes the development of musical…
My interest in how music makes sense was first piqued when, as a music student at the Royal Academy of Music in London, I met a blind child who, despite having learning difficulties, could reproduce the most complex music on the piano just by listening. Put simply, he had a better musical ear than I did, as a prize-winning student at a top conservatoire. Since that early experience, I have devoted my life to exploring just how music works (without the need for conceptual understanding) and how teachers can use the universality of music to promote social inclusion.
Although the language in the title of this book may now sound dated, its content is certainly not. I regard it as a ‘classic’ text in the field of music psychology, which was taking off when Miller put pen to paper.
Musical Savants represents the first rigorous exploration of exceptional musical talent in children with learning difficulties. I particularly like how, through a series of carefully designed experiments, Miller shows the nature of exceptional musical talent and how this can co-exist with areas of cognitive deficit.
Using the case study of "Eddie" as his framework, Professor Miller challenges the prevailing notion that musical savants are essentially phenomenal tape recorders and deals with the issue of "idiot savants" in a detailed, empirical investigation. Through "Eddie" the author discusses, in specific and in general, topics including the background and historical context of musical savants; other cases; data regarding the nature of the skills exhibited and the associated developmental deficits; and descriptions of a series of experiments used to define Eddie's talent. Finally, the author considers more general issues raised by savant behavior, particularly functions served by savant behavior,…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
My interest in how music makes sense was first piqued when, as a music student at the Royal Academy of Music in London, I met a blind child who, despite having learning difficulties, could reproduce the most complex music on the piano just by listening. Put simply, he had a better musical ear than I did, as a prize-winning student at a top conservatoire. Since that early experience, I have devoted my life to exploring just how music works (without the need for conceptual understanding) and how teachers can use the universality of music to promote social inclusion.
This is one of those rare textbooks that will make you smile with its delightful anecdotes that lighten what could so easily have become a dense academic treatise.
Huron writes in a warm, engaging way, producing an eminently readable book. He effortlessly shows how academic research findings affect the musical experience of ordinary listeners.
Sweet Anticipation serves as a great introduction to this important topic of how music makes sense and continues to move us, even after many repeated hearings of the same piece.
The psychological theory of expectation that David Huron proposes in Sweet Anticipation grew out of the author's experimental efforts to understand how music evokes emotions. These efforts evolved into a general theory of expectation that will prove informative to readers interested in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology as well as those interested in music. The book describes a set of psychological mechanisms and illustrates how these mechanisms work in the case of music. All examples of notated music can be heard on the Web.
Huron proposes that emotions evoked by expectation involve five functionally distinct response systems: reaction responses (which…
Music came to me as a bolt of lightning when I experienced, at 14 years old, the playing of pianist Vladimir Horowitz. My training in engineering, physics, and music propelled me into a career that continues to evolve. I am fascinated by what creative musicians in all cultures have accomplished through the ages, by how they worked, and by the ways in which new technologies and cross-cultural awareness enlarge music's potential futures. The Pulitzer Prize in Music and numerous other “authentifications” underlie my willingness and ability to make these claims. Music is the most malleable of the arts in terms of the contexts in which it can be useful.
McAdams in a uniquely catalytic and honored figure who has established, through numerous collaborative and ground-breaking experiments, the ways in which creative innovation in music can be optimized.
His leadership of institutions, including Ircam in Paris and CRMMT in Montréal, has impacted in enabling ways hundreds of musicians and scientists.
Perception and Cognition of Music: The Sorbonne Lectures presents revised and updated materials delivered in four distinguished lectures at the Universite Paris-Sorbonne and the Universite de Montreal, originally published in French.
The book bridges the fields of music psychology, music theory, and music analysis by way of a consideration of several aspects of music listening through the lens of cognitive psychology. Auditory grouping processes play a role in organizing the continuous incoming sensory information into events, streams of events, and segments of streams that form musical units. Perceived properties of events and streams depend on how the incoming information is…
Paul Harris is one of the UK’s most influential music educationalists. He studied the clarinet at the Royal Academy of Music, where he won the August Manns Prize for outstanding performance in clarinet playing and where he now teaches. He is in great demand as a teacher, composer, and writer (he has written over 600 books); and his inspirational masterclasses and workshops continue to influence thousands of young musicians and teachers all over the world in both the principles and practice of musical performance and education.
Whether you’re a learner or a teacher, developing an interest in what goes on behind the scenes will naturally reap many benefits. This fascinating book deals with many issues that need to be considered whether music is a hobby or a profession. Susan considers how music is processed in the brain, what musical ability actually is, the psychological side of learning to play an instrument and sing, what feeds into our motivation, and generally the extraordinary impact that music has on our lives.
The book will be of particular interest to those training to be instrumental and class teachers, and teachers wishing to further their understanding of teaching and learning. It addresses the psychological underpinnings of all elements of music education and provides a short introduction to the field of music psychology.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’ve spent the past thirty years leading the movement to integrate the humanities, and especially literary study, with evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience. I got my PhD in comparative literature right about the time the academic literary world was being convulsed by the poststructuralist revolution (Derrida, Foucault, et co). I felt a profound antipathy to the sterile paradoxes and attenuated abstractions of that theory. I wanted a theory that could get close to the power literature had over my own imagination. The evolutionary human sciences have provided me with a basis for building a theory that answers my own need to make sense of literature.
Boyd combines research on human evolution with cognitive psychology. He offers crisp and lucid summaries of the relevant research. His writing is like that of the best popular science. His marshaling of ideas from evolutionary and cognitive psychology offers an alternative to critical theories that have lost touch with science, and with much of reality.
A century and a half after the publication of Origin of Species, evolutionary thinking has expanded beyond the field of biology to include virtually all human-related subjects-anthropology, archeology, psychology, economics, religion, morality, politics, culture, and art. Now a distinguished scholar offers the first comprehensive account of the evolutionary origins of art and storytelling. Brian Boyd explains why we tell stories, how our minds are shaped to understand them, and what difference an evolutionary understanding of human nature makes to stories we love.
Art is a specifically human adaptation, Boyd argues. It offers tangible advantages for human survival, and it derives…
I'm a mathematician but an unusual one because I am interested in how mathematics is created and how it is learned. From an early age, I loved mathematics because of the beauty of its concepts and the precision of its organization and reasoning. When I started to do research I realized that things were not so simple. To create something new you had to suspend or go beyond your rational mind for a while. I realized that the learning and creating of math have non-logical features. This was my eureka moment. It turned the conventional wisdom (about what math is and how it is done) on its head.
I’m interested in how mathematicians create mathematics but this book made me realize that learning mathematics is also a form of creativity. Each of us has created our understanding of mathematics as we were growing up. We are all creative!
What is amazing about this book is that even children as young as six months possess rudimentary mathematical concepts, in particular, the concept of number. (Actually, Carey shows children have two distinct ways of thinking about numbers). The concept of number is built-in. That’s amazing to me! The mastery of counting numbers, 1,2,3,… is a great creative leap in the development of the child. This leap is followed by a series of further amazing accomplishments, for example, the insight that a fraction like 2/3, is a completely new kind of number (and not just a problem in division). How do kids manage to accomplish such radical changes in their concept…
Only human beings have a rich conceptual repertoire with concepts like tort, entropy, Abelian group, mannerism, icon and deconstruction. How have humans constructed these concepts? And once they have been constructed by adults, how do children acquire them? While primarily focusing on the second question, in The Origin of Concepts , Susan Carey shows that the answers to both overlap substantially.
Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems of core cognition. Representations of core cognition are the output of dedicated input analyzers, as with perceptual representations, but these core representations differ from perceptual representations…
I’m a musician – singer/composer/educator/researcher – based in Northern England, and I’ve become fascinated through my community music work to see how music can change people’s experience – of themselves, of other people, of their community and their relationship to the world around them. With all of the complex challenges we currently face as a species, I’m interested in the potential of music-making as a resource to help us navigate toward a more hopeful future. Making music is an important part of our unique collective history as humans – and we need to draw on it now to help us evolve into a species that can live more harmoniously and sustainably on our fragile planet.
Tia DeNora is a brilliant sociologist who writes a lot about music, and this book makes a great argument for music as a resource, or what she calls a ‘technology of self’.
We use music to shape our identity, and drawing on Erving Goffman’s ideas about ‘asylums’, she suggests that music is one such space we create in our lives where we can find ourselves again. Being musical becomes an integral part of being human.
Music has always been somewhere I’ve found solace and freedom, and I know that it’s the same for lots of the people I work with, and this book really explains why that’s so.
Taking a cue from Erving Goffman's classic work, Asylums, Tia DeNora develops a novel interdisciplinary framework for music, health and wellbeing. Considering health and illness both in medical contexts and in the often-overlooked realm of everyday life, DeNora argues that these identities are by no means mutually exclusive. Moreover, she suggests that the promotion of health and more specifically, mental health, involves a great deal more than a concern with medication, genetic predispositions, clinical and neuro-scientific procedures. Adopting a holistic, interactionist focus, Music Asylums reconnects states of wellness and wellbeing to encounters with others and - critically - to opportunities…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
As an experimental social psychologist, who has conducted years of empirical research on bullshitting behavior and bullshit detection, I’ve found compelling evidence that the worst outcomes of bullshit communications are false beliefs and bad decisions. I’m convinced that all of our problems, whether they be personal, interpersonal, professional, or societal are either directly or indirectly linked to mindless bullshit reasoning and communication. I’m just sick and tired of incompetent, bullshit artists who capitalize by repackaging and selling what I and other experimental psychologists do for free. It’s time the masses learn that some of us who actually do the research on the things we write about can actually do it better.
James Alcock is the only social psychologist I know who could write a clear, accessible, and comprehensive volume on the psychology of belief—particularly how our thoughts and feelings, actions and reactions, respond not to the world as it actually is but to the world as we believe it to be. No matter how much you think you know about beliefs, and no matter what you actually believe, any reader will find surprises in Alcock’s treatise, such as why so many people cling to beliefs that are foolish, self-destructive, and wrong, believing them to be wise, self-protective, and right. Belief convinced me that faulty beliefs, arising from misapprehension about the cause of a disease, misperceptions of an enemy’s actions, misreading a lover’s motive, misconceptions about which, if any, gods are real, can lead to irrational, maladaptive, and sometimes deadly actions.
An expert on the psychology of belief examines how our thoughts and feelings, actions and reactions, respond not to the world as it actually is but to the world as we believe it to be.
This book explores the psychology of belief - how beliefs are formed, how they are influenced both by internal factors, such as perception, memory, reason, emotion, and prior beliefs, as well as external factors, such as experience, identification with a group, social pressure, and manipulation. It also reveals how vulnerable beliefs are to error, and how they can be held with great confidence even when…
