Music cognition explores how the mind processes one of the most universal and emotionally powerful forms of human expression. Music exists in every known culture, engages widespread brain networks, and influences mood, memory, social bonding, and even physical health. The cognitive science of music draws on perception, memory, attention, emotion, development, and neuroscience to explain how structured patterns of sound create such profound experiences.
Pitch and Melody
Musical pitch perception builds on the auditory system's frequency analysis but adds distinctly musical features. Octave equivalence — the perception that notes separated by a factor of two in frequency sound similar — is found cross-culturally and reflects the periodicity of harmonic structure. Within octaves, cultures organize pitches into scales, with the 12-tone chromatic scale used in Western music being just one of many possibilities.
Melody perception involves tracking pitch intervals (the distance between successive notes) and contour (the pattern of ups and downs). Diana Deutsch's scale illusion and tritone paradox demonstrate that melody perception is not a simple readout of frequency but involves complex interpretive processes influenced by context and musical experience.
Rhythm and Meter
Rhythm — the temporal pattern of sound events — is processed by a distinct set of neural mechanisms from pitch. Meter perception involves the inference of a regular pulse or beat from the temporal pattern, even when the beat is not explicitly sounded. Once a meter is established, listeners generate temporal expectations, responding with surprise (measured by ERP or behavioral methods) when events violate the expected pattern.
Beat perception is closely linked to motor systems. Functional MRI studies consistently show activation of the basal ganglia, supplementary motor area, and premotor cortex during rhythm processing, even when listeners are sitting still. This motor involvement may explain the universal human tendency to move in time with music.
Music powerfully evokes emotions. Physiological measures (skin conductance, heart rate, pupil dilation) confirm subjective reports of musical chills and emotional arousal. The mesolimbic dopamine system — the brain's reward circuitry — is activated by pleasurable music, and dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens can be detected even in anticipation of a musical climax. Musical tension and resolution, created through harmonic progressions and melodic expectations, drive the emotional arc of musical experience.
Musical Training and the Brain
Musical training produces measurable changes in brain structure and function. Musicians show enlarged auditory cortex, increased corpus callosum volume (especially those who began training before age seven), and enhanced responses in auditory brainstem nuclei. Behaviorally, musicians demonstrate superior auditory processing, including better pitch discrimination, temporal resolution, and speech-in-noise perception. These findings have fueled interest in music education as a tool for cognitive enhancement, though transfer effects beyond auditory processing remain debated.
Developmental Perspectives
Infants show remarkable musical sensitivity. Newborns prefer consonant to dissonant intervals, can detect rhythmic violations, and prefer musical over non-musical sounds. By six months, infants can detect changes in simple melodies and show preferences for the musical scales of their culture. Sandra Trehub's research has shown that infant-directed singing (lullabies and play songs) is a cultural universal that may have played an important role in the evolution of both music and language.
Music and Language
Music and language share remarkable structural parallels — both involve hierarchical organization of discrete elements according to syntactic rules — and partially overlapping neural resources. Aniruddh Patel's shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis proposes that while musical and linguistic representations are stored separately, they share processing resources in the frontal cortex, explaining why musical syntax violations produce ERP responses similar to those elicited by linguistic syntax violations.