Preface

The study of music cognition and perception has generated a large number of publications, essays, and conferences, which demonstrate that the state of the art is in continuous development. Many scholars have begun to theorize about cognitive musicology, defined as the discipline that should include all these studies focusing on music perception and cognition. These studies are linked to varying degrees with experimental psychology, AI, connectionism, brain studies, semiotics and other cognitive sciences. Important publications that incorporate psychological issues on music theory and analysis have appeared (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983, Narmour 1990, Meyer 1973), and psychological studies of music have yielded stimulating and interesting hypotheses (Dowling and Harwood 1986, Sloboda 1985, Deutsch 1982, Gardner 1983). Moreover, these reflections have been explored, criticized and amplified in studies in which computational models have a central role (Leman 1989, Camurri 1990, Marsden and Pople 1991). It is doubtless that many barriers have tumbled down between the cognitive musicologists and the musicologists, but it would be wrong to view the two communities as communicating without problems. The main difficulty seems to lie in the diffidences between these two fields: studies treating of cognition and perception in music tend to be remote from many interesting ideas musicology has yielded and, conversely, new and stimulating approaches developed in the framework of music cognition have been viewed with diffidence by musicologists. Another problematic aspect is that this work has too often focused on Western music. Even though we can consider it normal that a primary interest should be the study of the mental process in relation to the music of our culture, the scope of these studies needs to be extended to other music in order to investigate the existence of abstract structures relevant to musical understanding. I completely agree with the late John Blacking who in his last interview asserted that there is a lot of psychology of music in his old book Venda Children’s Songs (Blacking 1967), a book normally thought to belong to ethnomusicological studies. It treats a particular musical culture in a non-Western population with no specific focus on musical cognitive processes while nevertheless explaining many of their facets. These critical issues do not imply that the content of cognitive musicological studies is uninteresting and worthless. Quite the contrary. Many studies represent a turning point in musical studies. The argument I would like to stress and a very important one in my view is that now is the time to extend our focus on musical matters and take into account aspects of real musical behaviour, which is often ignored or considered marginal or too difficult to deal with in the study of