From where, and by what mechanisms, does an individual's musical ability originate? The interest surrounding this question has recently been heightened by research into prenatal perception of sound, particularly among developmental and music psychologists. This timely volume provides an up-to-date, integrative account of research on the development of musical ability, particularly in infancy and early childhood. Each chapter addresses central issues and charts a child's developmental progress with reference to his or her changing environment: from the intense and semi-exclusive mother-baby...

This text comprises of reviews of work relating to music and mind. It presents a range of approaches from the psychological through the computational, to the musicological. The reviews were selected from papers submitted at the Third International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (Liege 1994) to illustrate the wide range of perspectives now being adopted in studying how humans make and respond to music.

This collection initiates a resolutely interdisciplinary research dynamic specifically concerning musical creativity. Creativity is one of the most challenging issues currently facing scientific psychology and its study has been relatively rare in the cognitive sciences, especially in artificial intelligence. This book will address the need for a coherent and thorough exploration.

Musical Creativity: Multidisciplinary Research in Theory and Practice comprises seven sections, each viewing musical creativity from a different scientific vantage point, from the...

The Musical Mind, published in 1985, was written by the relatively unknown John Sloboda. It made ground-breaking inroads in raising crucial questions relating to music's status as a form of human expression and has become the seminal text in the field of music psychology. The scope of that book was impressive: from music perception to production, embracing topics as diverse as music's origin and the circumstances that encourage its skill acquisition. Musical structure, grouping, and perceptual processing, including memory, were key areas where John Sloboda had made early empirical...

This text comprises of reviews of work relating to music and mind. It presents a range of approaches from the psychological through the computational, to the musicological. The reviews were selected from papers submitted at the Third International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition Liege 1994 to illustrate the wide range of perspectives now being adopted in studying how humans make and respond to music. The book is divided ino five sections. The first part illustrates the role of analysis and ethnomusicology in understanding cultural determinants of musical behaviour. The second...