ABSTRACT
Writing on the relationship between music and human behavior goes back to classical antiquity – and in a broad sense the psychology of music therefore has a very long history. The Greek philosophers Aristoxenus, Plato, and Aristotle all made important contributions to an understanding of the nature of musical materials and their effects on people, and were very aware of the power of music to cause both psychological and social unrest, as well as its capacity to calm, soothe, divert or give pleasure. Important though these writings are from a historical perspective, and in their continuing influence on contemporary psychology of music, what would now be recognized as the psychology of music dates from the rise of psychology itself in the second half of the nineteenth century. The two most influential figures in early music psychology were Hermann von Helmholtz and Carl Stumpf, representing very different theoretical positions, but both focusing principally on what might be called “the elements of music”: the sensations of pitch, rhythm, intensity, and timbre. This can be seen both as reasonable – since there is a certain logic in looking at what might be thought of as the building blocks of music (pitches and rhythms) as a first step; and as ideologically loaded – positioning music as an object, separated from human activity and divorced from its context. Helmholtz’s and Stumpf’s approaches were the forerunners of contemporary psychoacoustics, the study of relationships between acoustical events (frequencies, durations, and intensities) and their psychological counterparts (pitches, timbres, rhythms, and loudness).
