ABSTRACT
The field psychology of music is concerned with the processes by which people perceive, respond to, and create music, and how they integrate it into their lives. The psychology of music attracts not only psychologists and musicians, but scholars and researchers from a wide range of other disciplines. The chapter explores the perspectives from fields such as acoustics, neuroscience, musicology, education, philosophy, and ethnomusicology, among other disciplines. Within psychology of music, developmental psychologists are concerned with the emergence and maturation of musical behaviors, music perception and cognition in infancy. Music is differentiated into a wide variety of musical cultures across the world, an anthropological perspective highlighting the study of distinct human cultures and their 'musics' is also relevant to an understanding of the psychology of music. Psychology of music is also distinguished by the scientific research methods commonly employed to study musical phenomena of interest, which leads one to a certain kind of explanation for the phenomena under investigation.
