ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is conceived as a broad narrative trajectory, although it has divided into three parts so as to highlight the notion of familiarity from three key perspectives: listening, musicology and performance. It is driven by music psychologists who explore the influence of familiarity on people's engagement with music through listening based on empirical enquiries, specifically how much they listen, and how much they like the music they listen to, the process of getting to know music through regular listening, how comfortable they feel when listening, and music's efficacy as a pain-reliever. The book exposes the notion of familiarity from varied musicological stances, including ethnomusicological, analytical, philosophical, practical and educational. It provides important links across the three parts: the role of schemata in cognitive understanding of music; responses to Berlyne's influential research; socio-cultural issues; group-music making; memory and learning; and reflexivity in research.
