This PhD study investigates how our perception of musical chords, both in isolation and in musical context, is influenced and shaped by our knowledge of the tonal hierarchy and tonal syntax in terms of consonance/dissonance, pleasantness/unpleasantness, stability/instability, and relaxation/tension. Six experiments were conducted to gather behavioural data on the perception of chords from listeners with varying levels of musical training and experience. The first study is principally concerned with the influence of frequency of occurrence on the perception of twelve types of chord in isolation, including both triads and tetrads. It also examines to what extent factors besides frequency of occurrence, namely listener familiarity with the timbre in which chords are played and the acoustic features of chords, predict listener perception. The second and third studies concern the perception of chords in musical context. The second study focuses on musical contexts in which diminished and augmented chords appear, and on the harmonic functions of chords in short sequences of IV-V-I. Using sequences containing an augmented chord, the third study investigates the ways in which a non-diatonic tone can be anchored by its succeeding tone, and considers how the perception of these sequences is influenced by the harmonic function of its succeeding chord. These studies all reveal that the way in which chords and chord sequences are perceived is not completely predetermined by their acoustic, physical dimension. In addition, we impute on them a fluidity and elasticity as a result of our knowledge of the tonal hierarchy and tonal syntax in our musical schemata.

The aim of this work is to lay the basis of a post-Cartesian cognitive science of music. Traditional psychology of music often adopts a theoretical framework in line with the dualistic stance characterising the Cartesian approach, which implies a separation between mind and matter or, in its materialistic version, a separation between brain and body. I criticize such a paradigm on the basis of theoretical and empirical evidence, showing that alternative models of human musicality offer more plausible explanations without any dichotomy between objective/subjective and internal/external. The thesis that I will defend throughout this work holds that musical cognition is not something that occurs in our head. Rather, it is a process that extends beyond the boundaries of skull and skin, being constituted by the dynamic interplay between embodied agents and the environment in which they are embedded. I will defend such a claim through an interdisciplinary approach that lies at the intersection of different fields of research (cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, phenomenology) and by providing an original interpretation of the enactive paradigm that emerged during the last decade of the Twentieth Century in the realm of cognitive science.

The thesis reports cross-cultural studies in Egypt and Northern Ireland investigating the relationship between music and emotion, including both felt and expressed emotions, and focusing on the emotions happiness, sadness and love. The aim of the research was to test the extent to which certain types of musical features are universally related to certain emotional reactions or certain emotional expressions. In the first study, participants in Belfast and Cairo took part in a task where they heard excerpts from pieces from both Western-European and Arabic traditions associated with happiness, sadness and love in each tradition. There were three conditions in the study, each with six different instrumental excerpts (Western Love, Western Happy, Western Sad, Arabic Love, Arabic Happy, Arabic Sad). Jn the second study, again using a computerised task, the Belfast and Cairo participants heard songs from Western-European classical, Arabic (tarab and Sufi) and Indian raga traditions thought to induce strong emotional responses. There were three conditions in the study, each with four different excerpts (Western-European classical, tarab, Sufi and Indian raga). Participants were assigned to one of the three conditions, and, after hearing each excerpt, they reported the emotions they felt while hearing the songs (using discrete and dimensional measures). In both studies, musicians and non-musicians were involved to account for the effect of musical training on felt and expressed emotions. It was predicted that certain musical features would express and cause particular emotions, that a relationship also exists between felt and expressed emotions, and that familiarity would be a major factor in determining felt and expressed emotions. It was also hypothesised that certain musical features can cause intense reactions to music, causing people to 'feel moved.' It was predicted that culture would influence these relationships, although some relationships may be prevalent despite participants having different cultural backgrounds.

This thesis articulates an approach to our musical interactions with sounds and technologies influenced by Object Oriented Philosophy and the thought of Gilles Deleuze. The research question is borne out of the practice itself and the questions it poses: how to make sense of my own relationship with sounds as a listener, improviser and composer, and how to understand my engagement with the technologies which mediate this relationship. The most prominent technology I encounter is the laptop, which throughout my practice is used as a musical instrument, and a large part of my research also involves the development of a sensor instrument which utilises the Apple iPhone. The research thus serves as an exploration of both the laptop-as-instrument and certain ‘post laptop’ possibilities, alongside the development of a framework within which to critically consider our relationships to these new instruments. Music involves multiple ‘objects’, a concept which includes (but is not limited to) sounds, songs, instruments, speakers, performers and listeners. Object Oriented Philosophy tells us that these objects are withdrawn: they possess ‘hidden worlds’ or reservoirs of potential that we do not exhaust through any one encounter. Sounds and instruments can be always be used in different ways and reveal different qualities through the networks they are placed in. Listening and playing are construed as being a challenge to find the hidden potentials and affordances in sounds, through changing the way we listen or recontextualising or reworking the sound itself: a range of different strategies for approaching sounds is discussed. I also bring this approach to new instruments - such as laptops, sensor instruments or electronics set-ups - asking what their unique affordances and ‘hidden worlds’ are, and how they might not be actualised should we approach them with fixed ideas about what instruments, performance and music are.

Social cognition in general, and rhythmic entrainment in particular, have previously mainly been studied in settings where isolated individuals perform controlled tasks. Recently, a number of alternative approaches have been developed to redefine what constitutes the “cognitive system”. In addition to the individual mind/brain, the body, the social context, and musical instruments should be included in the analytical framework. In general, this means studying cognition and behaviour at settings that are as naturalistic as possible. Music and dance are ideal domains for studying these phenomena, as naturally social, embodied activities. Extending the traditional setting poses many challenges. I make the case for focusing the analysis on the interaction of multiple participants, instead of trying to measure the performance or mind-states of the individuals. This interactionist approach requires a specific set of analysis tools. For this purpose, I distinguish rhytmic synchronisation from entrainment between mutually cooperative individuals. I discuss a range of options from circular statistics to cross-recurrence analysis to various correlation-based analyses. Through a number of pilot studies, I developed a cooperative tapping setup for studying rhythmic entrainment in dyads. Using this setup, I compared human–human interaction to synchronising with a computer. Surprisingly, two human tappers reached better synchronicity than a human with a computer tapper, even though the human pairs drifted in tempo. This demonstrated the power of mutual adaptation. In a second series of experiments, motion capture was used to investigate the embodied nature of rhythmic entrainment. These cross-cultural studies on African dance, illustrated in more detail how synchronicity was achieved through a process of continuous, mutual adaptation. We observed interesting contrasts in how Finnish novices and South-African or Kenyan experts exhibited embodied metrical structures. As a conclusion, mutual adaptation is a powerful and ubiquitous phenomenon that can only be observed in real-time interactions. It is a good example of the kind of “new psychology” that can be uncovered by adopting a social, embodied, and dynamic approach to cognition.

Music can exist without sound. In the absence of sound, the mind can, deliberately or not, recall familiar music or generate novel musical material. The ubiquitous, internal experience of music that comes to the mind unintentionally and repeats itself, known as involuntary musical imagery (INMI), constitutes the focus of the present thesis. The aim of this research was to investigate the relationship between INMI and other forms of spontaneous and creative cognition in order to (a) elucidate the cognitive states preceding INMI, (b) identify individual differences related to spontaneous phenomena, and (c) describe phenomenological aspects of novel INMI. Three studies focused on the connection between INMI and spontaneous cognition. A probe-caught experience sampling and a behavioral study showed that the cognitive states associated with INMI occurrence are related to low cognitive load, as holds for other involuntary phenomena. The development of a scale measuring different INMI aspects revealed similarities with other forms of spontaneous cognition and allowed the exploration of individual differences as well as the investigation of relationships with other aspects of musical behaviors and auditory imagery abilities. A fourth, interview-based study explored the relationship between novel INMI and creative cognition and by elucidating the phenomenological aspects of the experience as well as of the translation of the inner experience to an external outcome, identified similarities with familiar INMI, voluntary musical imagery, and creative musical imagery. Overall, the results of this research suggest that INMI overlaps to some extent with other forms of spontaneous and creative cognition, music perception, and voluntary musical imagery. Novel methodological tools that were developed for the purposes of this research and findings regarding the subjective evaluation of the experience and the element of repetition will also be discussed. Finally, issues related to terminology, length of the experience, research methodology, future avenues, and possible applications will be considered.

This thesis explores the roles of the composer, listener and performer in the construction of aesthetic experience and develops new theories in order to elucidate these roles. It uses a series of six diverse case studies to show how these relationships can shape the experience created in the reception of music. In so doing, it sees the creation of musical experience as an intersubjective phenomenon. The theories explored within this work suggest new and different foci on the relationships between the roles within musical production and reception and greatly expand existing understanding of how music is communicated meaningfully and how cultural value is attributed to certain musical works. These theories are all constructed using the concept of the chain of communication which includes the relationships between composers, listeners and performers. The first chapter uses two case studies to investigate musical listening through an empirical investigation into Johann Sebastian Bach's Double Violin Concerto and a reception-based examination of Gustav Mahler's Fourth Symphony. In the second chapter, musical composition is studied through examinations of a variety of works by Joseph Haydn and Franz Schubert. Finally, Chapter Three looks at musical performance through case studies on the work of the Early Music ensemble Red Priest and Procol Harum's song ‘A Salty Dog'. The approaches used to examine the case studies are taken from a variety of fields and areas, ranging from music psychology to myth-studies. In this way, this work fills a gap in musicological understanding of aesthetic experience, as it combines research from a variety of fields to further elucidate musical experience: an approach which has not previously been used within musicology. In so doing, this work examines how experience can be shaped and how it is subject to historical and cultural conditioning.

Considerable interest has been shown in the field of music aesthetics in recent years, not only by aestheticians but also by writers from diverse fields such as musicology, psychology and linguistics. What we have witnessed in these discussions have been not only painstaking analyses of music in terms of its aesthetic value, but also explorations of music in relation to a varied range of research areas from examining the relations between music and mind using psychological methods, through evaluating music in terms of our post-modem notion of art, to exploring the relations between language and music in terms of their semantic and semiotic characteristics. Such accounts typically seek to show that music is more than mere sound, and, in particular, several accounts focus on its expressiveness and its possibility of conveying a certain significance.

This research contributes to the scarce literature on the perceptual and cognitive abilities of musical savants. It focuses on one prodigious savant, comparing his abilities with those of other savants and ‘neurotypical’ musicians with absolute pitch. Three experiments are reported. The first comprises a chordal disaggregation task, in which 6 savants and 17 ‘neurotypical’ musicians, had to replicate the stimuli listened. While the savants as a whole outperformed the ‘neurotypical’ musicians, there was some overlap. The most successful participants (savant and some ‘neurotypical’) appeared to use a ‘bottom up’ strategy, whereby the lowest notes were reproduced most successfully. This suggests that savants and some ‘neurotypical’ musicians process chords similarly. The second experiment explored the capacity of the savant to learn and recall a novel piece of music through exposure one bar at a time. The results show that the savant found this conventional approach to learning more difficult than a comparable task, in which exposure to a different though structurally similar piece was only ever as a whole. This finding contributes to the debate on ‘weak central coherence’ that appears to be a feature of the cognitive style of people on the autism spectrum. The third experiment investigates whether and in what ways the prodigious savant’s capacity to process and remember auditory material may be domainHspecific, by comparing his ability to learn and recall a verbal stimulus with an isomorphic musical one. The prodigious savant found the text, which was shorter and less complex than the music, to be very difficult to memorise. However, another savant performed on the task better than one ‘neurotypical’ musician, and worse than another. This finding indicates that savants do not form an entirely homogeneous group with regard to cognitive abilities, and, in the case of the prodigious savant, adds to the debate on the potential modularity of intelligence.

Dawkins introduced the concept of the meme as the cultural equivalent to the gene (1989, pp. 189-201). To illustrate the concept, Dawkins cited ‘tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches’ (1989, p. 192) as examples of memes. All of Dawkins’ examples are elements of culture that have evolved over time. Because music is a part of culture, then under Dawkins’ hypothesis, memes should exist in music. After all, the first of Dawkins’ examples was a ‘tune’. Jan expanded on Dawkins’ ideas with a thorough investigation into memes in music (2007). This was done on a number of different levels within music, from melodic lines to overall structure, using a range of examples within music. Whilst providing a strong case for memes, Jan was not able to provide evidence from an analysis encompassing a large dataset of music. However, Jan does provide a number of possible methodologies for analysing memes in music, including investigating memes across time periods using single lines of notes (2007, p. 211). The present research expands on Jan’s suggested methodology by looking at short monophonic three- to eleven-note patterns in music across five different non-traditional musicological time periods within a large dataset of string quartets. A search for memes in music is conducted using a range of scores. These are converted to MusicXML documents, which are then imported into a relational database. Data mining is then implemented on the resultant dataset to produce a series of ranking positions for monophonic note patterns within the music based upon the relative frequencies of their appearances within specified time periods. Additionally, a similarity algorithm is used to investigate the possible ancestral relationships between different monophonic note patterns. Within the limitations of the working definitions and assumptions made in the research, it was shown that there is evidence for the evolutionary properties of selection, replication and variation, and the replicator properties of longevity, fecundity and copying fidelity for some monophonic note patterns within the dataset.