ABSTRACT
Music is one of the most complex of human activities. It has played a role in human culture since before recorded history, serving ritual, functional, and entertainment purposes. But music has also been studied as a product of human perception and cognition. It is considered both perceptual and cognitive because it involves sensory processing on two levels: the progress of sound through our auditory physiological system (perception); and the processing of that sound into higher-order conceptual thinking about music (cognition). During the late twentieth century, the study of music sensation and cognition developed into a fairly unified field of intellectual inquiry, one in which psychologists, neuroscientists, music theorists, and musicologists participate. This field is the largest and most significant research area in music psychology, and is generally referred to as “music perception.”
