Musical Cognition ― A Science of Listening

In this reprint from 2009, which contains a new afterword on recent research on musicality and language, Honing considers the active role of listeners in making music meaningful, arguing that listening occurs in the mind and brain. He draws on research from various fields to show that all humans are musical from infancy to adulthood, and describes early listening experiences in the form of baby talk, the Mozart effect, the biological origins of music, and music as play; the experience of untrained listeners in superficial listening; and how cognitive functions like memory, observation, attention, and expectation are stimulated through music. He discusses the differences between music and language and music and sound, the concepts of musicality and musical talent, humanity's ability to hear the beat, the phenomena of perfect and relative pitch, how music is cognition that occurs in the listener's mind, and how everyone is musical. He avoids physiological and neurological jargon and illustrations, focusing on the mind and using mostly diagrams and notational examples that untrained listeners can understand. Annotation c2014 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)