Lecture
Music psychology (German: Musikpsychologie, English: Music psychology) — is a scientific discipline that studies various psychological aspects of musical language and the structure of musical works, and also investigates the patterns of psychological perception of music and its effect on various structural components of the human psyche.
Music psychology is an interdisciplinary science, belonging simultaneously to the field of musicology and to the field of applied psychology. Therefore, developments in the field of music psychology may include, for example, various specialized studies in the field of musical acoustics, psychoacoustics, the neuropsychology of perception, the psychophysiology of hearing and movement, aesthetics, cultural studies, pedagogy, and so on.
The main areas of scientific research in the field of music psychology are the following:
The problems of music psychology as such were considered at all stages of the development of musical art, starting from the times of early antiquity.
Of considerable interest, from the standpoint of the development of music psychology, is the Theory of Affects that arose in the Baroque era, whose main developers were Johann Quantz, Marin Mersenne, Athanasius Kircher, Johann Walter, Claudio Monteverdi, Johann Mattheson, Giovanni Bononcini, and Christian Spiess. According to the Theory of Affects, the goal of compositional creativity is the arousal of affects, with certain musical styles and other means of compositional writing assigned to groups of them. In Athanasius Kircher's view, the conveying of affects was not reducible to any purely craft-based techniques, but was a kind of magical act of controlling the «sympathy» «arising between a person and music». Many composers of that era specially studied this magic, including the greatest of them — Claudio Monteverdi.
As an independent scientific discipline, music psychology began to take shape from the mid-19th century. The main impetus for this came from research in the field of experimental psychophysiology and the development, directly related to that research, of a scientific theory of musical-auditory perception, which was formulated in complete form in the works of Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz. Helmholtz developed the resonance theory of hearing, according to which auditory sensations arise in a person owing to the resonance of the internal organs of hearing in response to external influences. Another innovative idea of Helmholtz's was the proposition that a single sound is a kind of chord, whose sounding is based on quite definite laws of acoustics. In his «theory of consonance and dissonance», Helmholtz explained many important phenomena in the field of psychoacoustics by the occurrence of beats between partial and combination tones: the greatest number of such beats is observed in dissonant intervals (seconds, tritones, sevenths), the smallest — in consonant ones (octaves, fifths).
Helmholtz's research touched on various scientific and practical questions related to problems of perception, creativity, the diagnosis of abilities, and methods of musical education, which gave a powerful impetus to the development of almost all areas of music psychology.
Many of Helmholtz's ideas were later taken up and his findings creatively rethought in the works of C. Stumpf, O. Abraham, M. Meyer, and E. Mach.
Carl Stumpf regarded music as a unique cultural phenomenon, and therefore, as opposed to the results of experiments conducted by psychologists trained in the introspective analysis of consciousness (the school of W. Wundt), he considered the testimony of expert musicians to be more worthy of trust.
One of the main concepts of Stumpf's psychology of sound is the «fusion» of sounds: the multiplicity of sounds that form a single, integral consonance in the minds of listeners. In this approach, dissonance is regarded as the «individuation» of sounds out of this unity.
Stumpf made the largest contribution after Helmholtz to research in psychological acoustics. But, unlike Helmholtz, Stumpf opposed «objective methods» of research, thereby declaring the idea that a strict distinction between physical and mental phenomena is impossible, which implied the need to study holistic psycho-physical complexes in the field of psychoacoustics.
C. Stumpf laid the foundations of the concept of the «two components of musical pitch», according to which, with a change in one physical parameter of sound — the frequency of its oscillations — two psychological characteristics of the sound change simultaneously — its timbre and its pitch.
A significant contribution to the development of music psychology was also made by W. Wundt (who enriched music psychology with the methodological tools of experimental psychophysiology), W. Köhler (who brought the fundamental principles of Gestalt psychology into music psychology), G. Révész (who thoroughly researched the phenomenon of musical giftedness), and other well-known scientists.
Various questions and problems related, above all, to the psychology of musical perception and musical ear, were then thoroughly developed also in the works of such well-known Soviet musicologists and psychologists as B. V. Asafyev, S. N. Belyaeva-Ekzemplyarskaya, B. M. Teplov, V. V. Medushevsky, E. V. Nazaikinsky, T. S. Tarasov, L. L. Bochkarev, B. L. Yavorsky, Yu. N. Tyulin, L. A. Mazel, M. V. Blinova, E. A. Maltseva, N. A. Garbuzov, A. A. Volodin, and Yu. N. Rags. The first textbooks on music psychology for students of conservatories and higher education institutions of art and culture were written by Leonid Lvovich Bochkarev (The Psychology of Musical Activity — Publishing House of the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997, 352 p.; reissued by the «Klassika-XXI» publishing house in 2006, 2007, 2008), Valentin Ivanovich Petrushin (Music Psychology — Moscow, 2004); Arnold (Aron) Lvovich Gotsdiner (Music Psychology — Moscow, 2003); G. V. Tsypin, The Psychology of Musical Activity — Moscow, 2004; Galina Petrovna Ovsyankina (Music Psychology — St. Petersburg, 2004); Marina Sergeyevna Starcheus (Music Psychology — Moscow, Moscow State Conservatory, 1999; Musical Ear — Doctoral dissertation — Moscow, 2005).
Music psychology is of scientific and practical interest in several respects:
— in the pedagogical respect, which concerns questions of the upbringing and training of musicians;
— in the musicological respect, which is above all connected with problems of the reflection of reality in music and the demonstration of the process by which artistic meaning takes shape in a musical work;
— in the socio-psychological respect, which relates to various patterns in the existence of music in public consciousness;
— in the properly psychological respect, which interests scientists from the standpoint of the most general tasks of studying the human psyche, its aesthetic needs, and its creative manifestations.
In the strictly musicological sense, the field of application of music psychology covers all types of musical activity: composing music, performing music, perceiving music, music-theoretical analysis, and musical education.
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