The Problem with Psychological Research into Popular Songs

Marta García Quiñones

Presented at the seminar “Popular Music and Power: Sonic Materiality between
Cultural Studies and Music Analysis”, conceived by Jens G. Papenburg to mark the
retirement of Professor Peter Wicke, and organized by the Institute of Musicology and
Media Studies, Humboldt University Berlin, 24-25th June 2016,

I would like to begin by making some considerations about the general subject of this
seminar (popular music and power) and the subject of this presentation, which will deal
with a very specific kind of power: the power that is exercised by tracing the boundaries
of academic disciplines, establishing new fields of study associated with certain
research strategies, and providing them with the kind of human and material resources,
discursive tools, legal regulations, and financial structures that also make possible that
we are meeting here today. More specifically, I would like to discuss the relationship
between popular music and a discipline whose origins are located in this town, at the
end of the 19th century: music psychology. I intend to reflect on the materiality of
sound, and particularly music, in those contexts where it is used as stimulus in order to
study the psychic mechanisms that allow us to perceive and enjoy it. To put it in very
simple terms, I will try to look at which is the music that music psychologists
purportedly study and whether (and eventually how) their choice of stimuli may be
conditioned by their theoretical approach.
One of the biggest publishing successes of this century, Daniel Levitin’s This is
Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, published in 2006, and to a
lesser extent his The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human
Nature, published in 2008, projected the notion that popular songs lie at the core of
music psychologists’ interests and research procedures. According to Nielsen Bookscan,
This Is Your Brain On Music sold more than one million copies, spending more than a
year on The New York Times and other bestseller lists, and it has been translated so far
into 18 languages, including Spanish or Italian (though not Catalan).1 Levitin is an
American psychologist and neuroscientist based at McGill University, in Montreal, and

1
Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain On Music: Understanding a Human Obsession, London, Atlantic Books,
2006; and also by him, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, New York,
Dutton, 2008. For data on foreign editions and sales, see Wikipedia, “This Is Your Brain On Music”,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Your_Brain_On_Music [last access: July 2016].

1
the enthusiastic reception of his book may certainly be attributed to the current
fascination with the brain, following the so-called “Decade of the Brain” (the 1990s),2
and the growing conviction that all human activities can be explained by inspecting and
understanding the brain processes that they trigger or accompany. Yet, there is another
important element that the majority of newspaper profiles, articles, and comments about
Levitin’s regularly highlight: he is a rock musician and music producer turned
psychologist, a music business insider with a knowledge of the nuts and bolts of
musical creativity, combined with an understanding of the inner functioning of the
brain. This aspect is backed up by Levitin’s repeated allusions to pop and rock songs in
his books, but perhaps even more by his participation, in 2009, in a Canadian television
documentary produced in association with National Geographic channel, My Music
Brain (originally titled The Musical Brain), which was inspired by This Is Your Brain
on Music. This documentary included, among other testimonies, those of Canadian
songwriter Feist and Canadian crooner Michael Bublé, Haitian rapper and music
producer Wyclef Jean, and British pop star Sting. Sting was actually chosen as a hook in
the television promo for the documentary, which can be watched here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s2EHtuNrPQ.
The way in which Sting is presented by the voice-over is significant, since he is
praised as a “single master musician”, using an expression (“master musician”) that is
typical of the history and ideology of classical music. As the promo explains, Sting’s
participation in the documentary consisted in being used as a guinea pig to explore how
his brain reacted to different kinds of music.3 His brain activity was visualized through
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is a non-invasive technique that
was developed in the 1990s to monitor brain activity, that is “to look into a person’s
brain” while she is doing something, i.e. something that is compatible with the
conditions that you can appreciate in the following picture:

2
On the expanding universe of scientific knowledge related to the brain, see for instance Francisco
Ortega and Fernando Vidal (eds), Neurocultures: Glimpses into an Expanding Universe, Frankfurt a.M. et
al., Peter Lang, 2011.
3
On auditory functions in the brain see chapter 9 (“Audition and the Central Nervous System”) of Stanley
Finger, Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into the Brain Function, New York, Oxford
University Press, 1994, pp. 124-133.

2
Sting going through the brain scanner at McConnell Brain Imaging Center, McGill University (Montreal,
Canada). Picture taken from the television documentary My Music Brain (or The Musical Brain).

An image produced by the brain scanner would look more or less like this:

Conjunction analysis of rhythm processing in musicians and non-musicians. Adapted from C. J. Limb, S.
Kemeny, E.B. Ortigoza, S. Rouhani & A.R. Braun, “Left Hemispheric Lateralization of Brain Activity During
Passive Rhythm Perception in Musicians”, The Anatomical Record Part A: Discoveries in Molecular,
Cellular, and Evolutionary Biology, vol. 288, no. 4, 2006, 382-389.

Illuminated areas in an fMRI image are normally interpreted as indexes of neuronal

activity, but what that image really shows (or rather, represents) are changes in blood

3
flow. In brief, neuroscientists know that firing neurons need more oxygen than non-
firing ones, and that while these neurons are active, they will be taking more of the
oxygenated haemoglobin that is carried in the blood. Therefore, they deduce that the
zones that are more irrigated by blood are those where neuronal activity must be higher.
Yet, as Levitin points out in This Is Your Brain on Music, this imagining
technique works much better for determining exactly which parts of the brain are active,
than for understanding how this activity evolves in time, because the distribution of
blood takes time.4 In the experiment conducted for the documentary My Music Brain
Sting was exposed to tango, jazz, classical music and muzak to see how his brain
reacted to these musics, and he was also asked to mentally compose a melody, what
allowed Levitin to see how other random brain activity diminished while activity in the
visual cortex, which is the area that is normally active when we watch somebody
playing music, intensified. This last experiment, which Levitin repeated four times, is
significant of the kind of mediations that are implicit in functional magnetic resonance
imaging including: 1) the instructions given by the researcher, and thus linguistic
descriptions of processes, tasks, or objects, formulated in common language 2) a
topology of the brain regions and their functions, as established by anatomical and
physiological research. While we may have the impression of actually seeing how the
brain reacts to music, what we are witnessing is really a much more complicated
process that requires different levels of interpretation. Musical research on the brain
connects with the obscure, pre-cognitivist tradition of measuring physiological effects
of music, for instance how musical emotions affect blood pressure or breathing
patterns,5 but it obviously takes it to a new level.

4
Levitin, This Is Your Brain On Music, pp. 128-131.
5
Some classical examples of this old physiological research can be found in Max Schoen (ed.), The Effects
of Music: A Series of Essays, London, K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Company Limited, 1927.

4
 Sting looks at the computer graphics of his brain waves. Handout /CTV. Published as an

illustration to the article “Sting lets science probe his brain to see how mind and music

mate” by Sheri Levine, Vancouver Sun, 28th January 2009.

But let me go back to our subject today, that is the role that popular music plays
in Levitin’s research. To a certain extent, the casting of a music star like Sting, and
participation in the documentary of appreciated pop musicians like Feist, Michael Bublé
or Wyclef Jean, is not only connected to the researcher’s background as rock musician
and producer, but it also legitimates and makes his activities more attractive to
audiences. On the other hand, it should just be normal to pay attention to the music that
most people listen to everyday, and in fact Levitin is not alone in this, since other music
psychologists, for instance German scholar Jan Hemming or British scholars Eric
Clarke and Nicola Dibben have also included popular tunes in their essays and
experiments. 6 However, what may perhaps surprise us is that Levitin’s choice of
popular music songs does not seem to be motivated by an interest in studying particular
psychological processes that may accompany their performance or reception. As he
declared in a 2008 interview published on the website of the American Academy of
Audiology,

6
See for instance Jan Hemming, “Hard Rock, Heavy Metal and Punk: Comparing Psychological Findings
with Cultural Studies Accounts”, paper presented at the 5th Triennial Conference of the European Sciety
for the Cognitive Studies of Music, Hanover, 2005; Eric Clarke, Ways of Listening: An Ecological
Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005; and Eric Clarke,
Nicola Dibben and Stephanie Pitts, Music and Mind in Everyday Life, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2009.

5
 “the distinction critics and historians make among classical and modern or
popular music is essentially nonsense. If you listen, they each share and overlap
with the other. For instance, Handel, Hayden [sic], Schubert, and others—so
much of their music came from popular and folk tunes and was woven into their
creations, but the more you listen, the more quickly the distinctions fall away.”7

As it is clear, here Levitin is making the case for the consideration of popular music on
a level with classical music. But he is doing so by stating that popular music is just
music, and thus that the usage of popular music songs as stimuli in psychological
experiments substantially is not adding anything to the field of music psychology.
Leviting is not alone in this, either. Whoever takes an excursion into current research
into music psychology will find out that descriptions of musical material employed in
experiments do not abound—in many cases the reader is only informed of the length of
the fragment played to the research subjects (e.g. 3 or 5 minutes of music). Yet, as I will
argue, these decisions are at least debatable, and more importantly, they contribute to
hide the historical, fundamental dependence of music psychology on notions and tacit
assumptions that belong into the ideology of classical music.
This may seem an odd statement to make in the town where philosopher Carl
Stumpf, considered one of the founders (if not “the” founder) of music psychology,
directed the first Institute of Psychology (Psychologisches Institut), established in 1900
at this university, which at the time was still called Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität.8
The Institute of Psychology also hosted the Phonographic Archive (Phonogramm
Archiv), which since 1900 had been gathering recordings (initially, wax cylinders) of
traditional music from around the world—including musicians visiting Berlin and field
recordings made by collaborators or travellers that had been instructed by the Archive’s
staff on how to record local musicians in a way that facilitated research.9 Since the same
person, Stumpf, was heading both projects, we may think that there was a certain
convergence of aims between the psychology of music and the study of traditional

7
Douglas L. Beck, “From Musician to Neuroscientist: An Interview with Daniel Levitin, PhD, author of This
Is Your Brain On Music”, Audiology.org, 11th August 2008, available online at:
http://www.audiology.org/news/musician-neuroscientist-interview-daniel-levitin-phd-author-your-brain-
music [last access: June 2016].
8
It was known by this name between 1828 and 1945
9
On this see Carl Stumpf, “Das Berliner Phonogrammarchiv”, Internationale Wochenschrift für
Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik, 2, 1908, pp. 225-246.

6
cultures, between psychology and popular culture. Yet, this was not exactly the case.
Stumpf and his team recognized the importance of eliminating the kind of cultural
interferences and habitudes that came in their way when they attempted to notate a
performance belonging to a foreign culture: they tried to eliminate or at least minimize
those interferences by relying on the new media of recording, which they considered
more objective. But, on the other hand, as scholars like Lars-Christian Koch, Albrecht
Wiedmann and Susanne Ziegler have pointed out, “the main concern of Stumpf,
Hornsbostel and other members of the Archive was to collect as many examples of
traditional music as possible in order to create and follow theories about the origin and
evolution of music in general”.10 In this sense, their interest in traditional music was at
least relatively independent from their psychological experiments.
In order to understand the position of Stumpf and his students in the history of
the psychology of music, it is important to understand that experimental psychology had
been established only at the end of the 19th century, on the basis of a distinction
between sensation and perception, or rather of a refashioning of the notion of sensation
that allowed the emergence of a proper psychological field. The way in which
sensations were investigated in the new psychological laboratories, in imitation of the
experimental practices that had come to be identified with the scientific method, put
them under a different light and changed how they were conceived. This new approach
to sensation can be recognized in the practice and writings of Wilhelm Wundt, a
physiologist by education and the founding father of experimental psychology—or, as
he also called the new discipline, “physiological psychology”—,11 who circa 1879
established the first psychological laboratory as part of the Institute of Experimental
Psychology that he led at the University of Leipzig.12 Wundt placed sensations at the

10
See Lars-Christian Koch, Albert Wiedmann and Susanne Ziegler, “The Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv: A
Treasury of sound recordings”, Acoustical Science and Technology, 25 (4), 2004, pp. 227-231, on p. 228.
11
Indeed, one of Wundt’s main works is titled Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (1873-1874),
translated into English by Edward Bradford Titchener as Principles of Physiological Psychology, London,
Sonnenschein, 1904, available online: http://psychcentral.com/classics/Wundt/Physio/ [last access: July
2016]. On the role of Wilhelm Wundt and the complexities of his intellectual stance, see Kurt Danziger,
“Wilhelm Wundt and the Emergence of Experimental Psychology”, in G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie, M.J.S.
Hodge, and R.C. Olby, R.C. (eds), Companion to the History of Modern Science, London, Routledge,
1990, pp. 396-409.
12
On the institution and early years of this laboratory, which initially seems to have been little more than a
storage space for Wundt’s instrument collection, as well as a place for conducting demonstrations to
supplement his lectures, see Wolfgang G. Bringmann, Norma J. Bringmann and Gustav A. Ungerer, “The
Establishment of Wundt’s Laboratory: An Archival and Documentary Study”, in Wolfgang G. Bringmann

7
very centre of his research; for him they were the “psychical elements” of psychological
life, out of which “psychical compounds” (ideas, emotions, volitional acts) were built.13
Regarding method, Wundt declared in his 1882 essay “Die Aufgaben der
experimentellen Psychologie” (The tasks of experimental psychology) that, if we
understood “observation” in a scientific sense, self-observation (introspection) was just
impossible: the more we make an effort to watch ourselves, the more certain we can be
that we observe simply nothing. According to him, inner states cannot be fixed with
attention, in fulfilment of a programme and certain expectations—that is, in the same
way as we would observe external objects—, but they can only be perceived freely and
fragmentarily.14 Instead, Wundt proposed two intertwined methodological alternatives
to introspection: in the first place, experimentation, understood as an active interference
in mental processes to a particular effect; in the second place, experimental observation,
which (contrary to “pure observation”) followed immediately on the original perception,
leaving virtually no time for the mind to elaborate on it, and resembling so scientific
observation.15 However, their scopes were quite restricted: though they could certainly
discover the existence of higher mental processes like apperception, volition or emotion,
according to Wundt these could not be analysed using experimental methods, 16 or could

and Ryan D. Tweney (eds), Wundt Studies: A Centennial Collection, Toronto, C.J. Hogrefe, 1980, pp.
123-157.
13
See Wilhelm Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, translated with the cooperation of the author by Charles
Hubbard Judd, Leipzig-London-New York, Wilhelm Engelmann-Williams & Norgate-Gustav E. Stechert,
1897 (originally published in German as Grundriss der Psychologie, Leipzig, Wilhelm Engelmann, 1896).
Actually, about 70 per cent of the psychological theses directed by Wundt in Leipzig from 1875 to 1920
(that is 81 out of a total of 116) were devoted to questions related to sensation and perception; see Miles
A. Tinker, “Wundt’s Doctorate Students and Their Theses 1875-1920”, in Bringmann and Tweney (eds),
Wundt Studies, pp. 269-279, at p. 278.
14
Wilhelm Wundt, “Die Aufgaben der experimentellen Psychologie”, Unsere Zeit, 1882, reprinted in
Essays, 2nd. ed., Leipzig, Engelmann, 1906, pp. 187-212, accessible online:
http://archive.org/details/essayswund00wunduoft [last access: July 2016], pp. 197-198. On this see also
Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 34-36.
15
Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, pp. 18-24
16
Indeed, Wundt thought that psychology’s aim was the explanation of the totality of mental life, and that
this could only be accessed through the kind of comparative cultural study that he called
Völkerpsychologie, to which he devoted the ten-volume work of the same title. Other scholars, among
which Wundt’s former student Oswald Külpe, who taught in Würzburg, did not share his vision on the
limits of experimental methods and attempted to study mental processes through so-called “systematic
introspection”. See Alfred H. Fuchs and Katharine S. Milar, “Psychology as a Science”, in Donald K.
Freedheim and Irving B. Weiner (eds), Handbook of Psychology, vol. 1. History of Psychology, Hoboken,
NJ, John Wiley & Sons, 2003, pp. 1-26, at p. 5; Danziger, “Wilhelm Wundt and the Emergence of
Experimental Psychology”, p. 404; and also his Constructing the Subject, pp. 36-37.

8
only be analysed indirectly at the most, for instance through the reaction-time
experiments that were so important during the first decades of experimental
psychology.17
Both experimentation and experimental observation had to be performed under
certain stable conditions, in the first psychological laboratories, which allowed also the
replication of experiments. Besides, in psychological laboratories, particularly in the
one that Wundt established in Leipzig, psychological experiments were limited to very
simple operations, most often involving the senses, so that the subjects—not just
anybody, but often trained students—18did not have time to reflect upon what they saw
or heard, but would just report it. New instruments also shaped and conditioned the
experimental programme; for example reaction-time experiments were typically
performed with the chronoscope.19 Many of the reaction experiments that contributed to
shape a new concept of sensation involved auditory stimuli, and the musical skills of
researchers were indeed valued during the first decade in which Wundt’s experimental
psychological laboratory was active.20 Musical sounds and instruments would continue
to be used as tonal stimuli in psychological experiments in audition until well into the
1920s, 21 and tuning forks and other acoustic apparatuses already occupied a place of
honour in the first psychological laboratories. For instance in 1888, when Wilhelm
Wundt’s historical Leipzig laboratory, active since 1879, was expanded for the second
time, the new facilities included also insulated rooms for acoustical experiments, and a

17
On the importance of reaction-time experiments for psychometrics, that is for the indirect measurement
of the duration of mental processes, see the contemporary account of James McKeen Cattell, “The
Psychological Laboratory at Leipsic” (1888), first published in Mind, 13, pp. 37-51, at pp. 45-46, available
online: http://psychcentral.com/classics/Cattell/leipsic.htm [last access: July 2016]).

18
On the question of the training of experimental subjects, see E.B. Titchener, “Anthropometry and
Experimental Psychology”, The Philosophical Review, vol. 2, no. 2, March 1893, pp. 187-192.
19
On the use of the chronoscope in the first German and French psychological laboratories, see
Jacqueline Carroy and Henning Schmidgen, Psychologies expérimentales: Leipzig-Paris (1890-1910),
“Preprint 206”, Berlin, Max-Planck-Institut fur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2002, accessible online:
https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/resources/preprints [last access: July 2016]; and also Henning
Schmidgen, “Time and Noise: the Stable Surroundings of Reaction Experiments, 1860–1890”, Studies in
History and Philosophy of Science. Part C: Biological and Biomedical Sciences, vol. 34, no. 2, June 2003,
pp. 237-275.
20
See chapter 5 (“The Bias of Musikbewusstsein When Listening in the Laboratory, on the City Street, and
in the Field”) of Alexandra Hui, The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds,
1840-1910, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2013, pp. 123-148.

See Edwin Boring, Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology, New York,
21

Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1942, pp. 320-321.

9
dedicated room containing an apparatus called drop-phonometer, which was used to
assess the perception of different sound intensities. 22 Later on, in 1897, Wundt’s
Institute of Experimental Psychology moved to a new building in Leipzig, which
contained a specific laboratory for acoustical experiments (another one was devoted to
visual experiments) where researchers and students could avail themselves of a long
series of tuning forks and other sound generators.23Among the theses on psychological
questions directed by Wundt from 1875 to 1920 (a total of 116), around a 16 per cent
(that is 19) focused on audition and acoustic phenomena. Some of these dealt with
issues (e.g. pitch perception, interval perception, the influence of articulation and
hearing in singing together, the emotional character of particular chord progressions)
that may be considered as musical.24
Nevertheless, as Alexandra Hui and others have observed, by 1890 consensus
about the value of musical expertise—that is, the auditory skills of musically trained
subjects— in the psychological laboratory was apparently broken among German
scholars, to the point that it became a subject of contention between Wundt and Stumpf,
who in 1883 and 1890 published the two volumes of his treatise Tonpsychologie (“The
Psychology of Tone”, or “The Psychology of Music”).25 Against Wundt and one of his
students, Carl Lorenz, Stumpf defended the relevance of musical auditory skills, that is
the need to employ musically trained subjects in experiments, and to consider the way
in which their musical expertise would affect the results. Stumpf was himself trained
musically and could play the violin. As Sebastian Klotz has argued, he was acutely
aware of the fact that music could not only be explained as a physical phenomenon, and
he tried to conceive an integrated theory of musical functions, sounds and judgements—

22
See Wilhelm Wundt, “Psychophysik und experimentelle Psychologie” (1893), quoted in Wolfgang G.
Bringmann, Norma J. Bringmann and Gustav A. Ungerer, “The Establishment of Wundt’s Laboratory: An
Archival and Documentary Study”, in Bringmann and Tweney (eds), Wundt Studies, pp. 123-157, at p.
152.
23
See Wilhelm Wundt, “Das Institut für experimentelle Psychologie zu Leipzig” (1910), quoted in Sven
Hroar Klempe, “The Role of Tone Sensation and Musical Stimuli in Early Experimental Psychology”,
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 47, no. 2, Spring 2011, pp. 187-199, at pp. 189-
191.
24
See Miles A. Tinker, “Wundt’s Doctorate Students and Their Theses 1875-1920”, in Bringmann and
Tweney (eds), Wundt Studies, pp. 269–279, and also Klempe, “On the Role of Tone Sensation and
Musical Stimuli in Early Experimental Psychology”, p. 189.
25
Carl Stumpf, Tonpsychologie, Band I, Leipzig, S. Hirzel, 1883, and Tonpsychologie, Band II, Leipzig, S.
Hirzel, 1890.

10
though this turned out to be an impossible task.26 Stumpf’s own way of conceiving
experiments was quite different from the one developed in Wundt’s laboratory; for
instance for his treatise Tonpsychologie he investigated the notion of Tonverschmelzung
or “tonal fusion” by listening to the organ of the cathedral in the town of Halle, where
he lived before moving to Berlin.27 “Tonal fusion” was the notion that Stumpf proposed
as the basis for a theory of consonance, since he opposed the theory of beats for which
Helmholtz had made the case in his famous Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als
physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (1863, translated by Alexander J.
Ellis as On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music in
1875).28 For Stumpf consonance depended on the greater tendency of sounds to cohere
and sound like a single complex tone when they shared harmonically related partials.
Though he eventually abandoned this theory, it is easy to see how the way in which
Stumpf explored this hypothesis, by carefully listening to sounds played on a cathedral
organ, was related to the theory itself, and how much the experimental process
depended on the expert skills of the musically trained listener.
Questions related to the perception of music soon evolved into an independent
discipline, the psychology of music, which was developed by Stumpf and other
contemporary scholars, like Hugo Riemann, Ernst Kurth, Ernst Mach, and the group of
Stumpf’s students (Kurt Koffka, Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler) that went to
found the very influential Gestalt school.29 Stump’s confrontation with Wundt on the
validity of musical skills for psychological experimentation is significant of the kind of
conceptual tensions from which the psychology of music historically originated.
Tensions that music theorist Robert Gjerdingen has presented as a controversy about the
cultural status of the “tone” as the basic unit of the tonal system (a system that at the
end of the 19th century already showed signs of crisis and would eventually

26
See Sebastian Klotz, “Tonpsychologie und Musikforschung als Katalysatoren wissenschaftlich-
experimenteller Praxis und der Methodenlehre im Kreis von Carl Stumpf”, Berichte zur
Wissenschaftsgeschichte, vol. 31, no. 3, September 2008, pp. 195-210.
27
See Adrian Brock, “Was macht den psychologen Expertenstatus aus?”, Psychologie und Geschichte,
Jahrgang 2, Heft 2, April 1991, pp. 109-114, on p. 110.
28
Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music,
translated by Alexander J. Ellis, London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1895; reprinted in New York, Dover,
1954.

See Mitchell G. Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890-1967: Holism and the Quest for
29

Objectivity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

11
disintegrate), as opposed to the consideration of the “tone” as “mere stimulus”.30 On a
general level, as Alexandra Hui has convincingly argued, music psychology originally
depended on the culture of classical music that was prevalent in late 19th-century
intellectual circles, particularly in the German-speaking countries. Concepts like
Vorstellung, representation, on which Riemann based his theory of musical hearing,
seem to point to a textual or at least imaginative level, a kind of mental score that we
can easily link to the centrality of the score in historical musicology. Yet, as I want to
argue here, the defence of the cultural status of the tone is inscribed not only in the
theoretical approach shared by many music psychologists, but also in the experimental
procedures and research strategies that they have implemented in order to legitimate and
expand their discipline: starting from the assumption that music would primarily be a
cognitive process, thus that bodily sensations would not play an important role in its
reception, through the presupposition of conditions of silent attention that stress the
continuity between the psychological laboratory and the concert hall, the prevalence of
instrumental music that we could justify as an advantage to reduce the number of
variables involved in experiments, to the blatant fact that rock, pop and other popular
genres have just not been considered until recently as possible material for music
psychology.
After the foundational years of music psychology, probably the historical
moment where these conditions became more visible was the 1980s, when the then
predominant cognitivist approach converged with the approach of music theory. A
common trait of both was their disregard for context and (in spite of music
psychology’s empirical claim) for actual music experiences: indeed, the listeners
studied by music psychologists very often corresponded to the “ideal listeners”
presupposed by music analysis. This happened to such an extent that, as Eric Clarke and
Nicholas Cook have convincingly criticized, music theory was transformed into a
“science of the mind”, confounding its aims with musical analysis. 31 The process

30
See his chapter “Psychologists and Musicians: Then and Now” in Diana Deutsch (ed.), The Psychology
of Music, 3rd ed., San Diego, CA, Academic Press, 2013, pp. 683-707.
31
See Eric F. Clarke, "Mind the Gap: Formal Structures and Psychological Processes in Music",
Contemporary Music Review, vol. 3, part 1 (issue editors: Eric Clarke and Simon Emmerson), London:
Harwood Academic Publishers, 1989, pp. 1-14; and Nicholas Cook, “Perception: A Perspective from
Music Theory”, in Aiello, Rita; Sloboda, John (eds.). Musical Perceptions. New York, Oxford University
Press, 1994, pp. 65-95. See also W. Jay Dowling and Dane L. Harwood, Music Cognition, Orlando,
Academic Press, 1986; Stephen McAdams, Music: A Science of the Mind?", Contemporary Music Review,
vol. 2, part 1 (issue editor: Stephen McAdams), London, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1987, pp. 1-61;

12
reached a climax with the publication, in 1983, of The Generative Theory of Tonal
Music, a work that presents musical theory as a branch of cognitive psychology,
explicitly taking in the interpretation of a virtual “expert listener”, and which apparently
provided music theory with a foundation so solid as Chomskian generative linguistics.32
Thus, within the cognitivist framework some of the topics most commonly associated
with music listening (or rather, with “music cognition”) were the recognition of music
qualities and structures, and the mental representation of musical works, sometimes
with a view to constructing computerized models. Yet, music psychologists dealt only
seldom with the listening of entire musical works, preferring instead to focus on
fragments and specific features, as pitch recognition or rhythm.
Now let me go back to Sting and his experience at McGill’s psychological
laboratory. The kind of neurobiological research that is conducted there is certainly able
to bypass any reference to the musical score, though—as I have argued before—the
experimental situation is not so simple as it may seem. The way in which it is presented
in the documentary, and explained by Levitin, hides some obvious facts. Because, why
was Sting asked to participate in this experiment in the first place? Why is he called a
“master musician”? Probably because he has learnt a few things during a musical career
extending along decades—skills that have to do, probably, with playing in a band and
interacting with other musicians, with mastering chord sequences and musical tropi that
are only partially coincidental with those of classical music, with knowing how to sing
into a microphone or adjusting volume levels at the recording studio. Can we really
presuppose that these learning processes have not made his brain at least a little
different from that of, let’s say, Schubert or Cage?

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