ABSTRACT
Music cognition involves research on human beings who listen to, enjoy, and perform music. Perhaps the earliest question about the human experience of music which drew scholarly attention is that of consonance and dissonance—what people feel when two tones are heard together, and why certain musical intervals heard as more consonant than the others. In Germany, the growth in universities made possible the progressive development of science and promoted interdisciplinary research on music and science through the association of psychoacoustics and physics. The other important German figure of music cognition in the 19th century is Carl Stumpf, a musicologist as well as a psychologist. Although "music cognition" is a term for psychological and scientific research on music, emphasizing its cognitive aspects, the terms "psychology of music" and "music perception" were more often used in the 1980s and 1990s. In the field of music psychology, the cognitive era saw researchers change their emphasis from sensation to cognition of music.
