Brain and Music

Making and listening to music engages a large array of psychological processes, including perception, attention, learning and memory, syntactic processing, the processing of meaning, and social cognition. This richness makes music the ideal tool to investigate human psychology and the workings of the human brain, and in recent years neuroscientists have increasingly used this tool to inform and extend their ideas. This book offers a comprehensive survey of the current state of knowledge in the cross-disciplinary field of music psychology.

An expert in his field, Stefan Koelsch establishes basic neuroscientific, music-theoretical, and music-psychological concepts, before presenting the brain correlates of music perception, musical syntax, musical semantics, music and action, and music and emotion.

Koelsch synthesizes all these conceptual threads into a new theory of music psychology. His theory integrates different areas such as music, language, action, and emotion that are traditionally treated as separate domains.