Music, Mind, and Brain, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 1982 The Neuropsychology of Music

There is much music in our lives -yet we know little about its function. Music is one of man's most remarkable inventions - though possibly it may not be his invention at all: like his capacity for language his capacity for music may be a naturally evolved biologic .function. All cultures and societies have music. Music differs from the sounds of speech and from other sounds, but only now do we find ourselves at the threshold of being able to find out how our brain processes musical sounds differently from other sounds. We are going through an exciting time when these questions and the question of how music moves us are being seriously investigated for the first time from the perspective of the co-ordinated functioning of the organism: the perspective of brain function, motor function as well as perception and experience. There is so much we do not yet know. But the roads to that knowledge are being opened, and the coming years are likely to see much progress towards providing answers and raising new questions. These questions are different from those music theorists have asked themselves: they deal not with the structure of a musical score (although that knowledge is important and necessary) but with music in the flesh: music not outside of man to be looked at from written symbols, but music-man as a living entity or system.

1 Concerning the Language of Music.- I: Music, Mind, and Meaning.- II: Brain Mechanism in Music: Prolegomena for a Theory of the Meaning of Meaning.- III: Physical and Neuropsychological Foundations of Music: the Basic Questions.- IV: The Living Quality of Music: Neurobiologic Basis of Communicating Feeling.- V: A Grammatical Parallel Between Music and Language.- VI: Organizational Processes in Music.- 2 Music and Neurobiologie Function.- VII: Speech, Song, and Emotions.- VIII: Prosody and Musical Rhythm are Controlled By the Speech Hemisphere.- IX: Perception and Performance of Musical Rhythm.- X: Neurobiologic Functions of Rhythm, Time and Pulse in Music.- XI: The Judgment of Musical intervals.- XII: affective Versus analytic Perception of Musical intervals.- XIII: Two Channel Pitch Perception.- XIV: Spectral-Pitch Pattern: a Concept Representing the Tonal Features of Sounds.- XV: Spectral Fusion and the Creation of auditory Images.- XVI: The Perceptual Onset of Musical Tones.- XVII: The Pitch Set as a Level of Description For Studying Musical Pitch Perception.- 3 Concerning Music and Computers.- XVIII: Impact of Computers On Music: an Outline.- XIX: Electronic Music: a Bridge Between Psychoacoustics and Music.- A Note — New Music and Neurobiologic Research: Can they Meet?.- XX: A Computer Model of Music Recognition.- Appendix: List of Sound Examples on the included Soundsheet.- Contributors.- Author index.