Music Perception

There has been an explosion of research on sensation and perception in music over the past 20 years. Although this work has historically concentrated on sensation and perception related to pitch, more recent work has branched out to encompass timbre, rhythm, and the interaction of these basic dimensions that underlie our experience of music. The methods employed in what has become a vast research enterprise span psychophysical, behavioral, computational, and neural approaches. To provide some structure, the chapter has been divided into four major sections. The first section deals with pitch perception and processing. The second section considers perceptual aspects of music beyond pitch, inclusive of timbre, consonance, melodic expectancies, and tonal hierarchies. The third section examines the role of time in the representation of longer excerpts of music, focusing on rhythm and event hierarchies. The final section reflects on those aspects of music that appear to be universal as well as the possible origins of music.