The book will serve as an excellent graduate-level textbook in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence.

Analyzes the meaning expressed in music, the social and psychological sources of meaning, and the methods of musical communication This is a book meant for ...

In the Essai sur Vorigine des langues (), Jean-Jacques Rousseau reports on an eighteenth-century curiosity that has, from time to time, fascinated musicians ...

How can an abstract sequence of sounds so intensely express emotional states? In the past ten years, research into the topic of music and emotion has flourished. This book explores the relationship between music and emotion, bringing together contributions from psychologists, neuroscientists, musicologists, musicians, and philosophers .

This collection of his later essays discusses the role played by ideological factors in determining the direction, if not the results, of scientific work.

It has often been claimed, and frequently denied, that music derives some or all of its artistic value from the relation in which it stands to the emotions. This book presents and subjects to critical examination the chief theories about the relationship between the art of music and the emotions.

Anton Dohrn rejected the popular Amphioxus-ascidian theory of vertebrate origin, which saw Amphioxus as the most primitive vertebrate and ascidians as vertebrate ancestors. Instead he argued for the segmented annelids as the more likely candidate. Attacked for being 'unscientific' by such popular morphologists as Carl Gegenbaur and Ernst Haeckel, Dohrn countered with similar accusations. Since the debate peaked as Dohrn was establishing his Stazione Zoologica in Naples at the end of the nineteenth century, it gained him valuable attention and may (...) have encouraged him to retain his view even in the face of new and problematic evidence. This paper explores Dohrn's contributions and the underlying commitments revealing what he regarded as important in science. (shrink)

Hermann von Helmholtz and Carl Stumpf on Consonance and Dissonance. The article juxtaposes Hermann von Helmholtz's work in the experimental physiology of hearing and Carl Stumpf's tone psychology, focusing on the problem of consonance and dissonance in music. It argues that the experimental set‐up plays a major role in the approaches to hearing of both Helmholtz and Stumpf, shaping their redefinition of the musical concepts of consonance and dissonance. Helmholtz, however, explains dissonance as resulting from the beats that are heard (...) when sound waves interfere, while Stumpf explains consonance from the fusion (Verschmelzung) of sounds, noting that two tones, depending on their distance cannot always be recognized as two but are heard as one single tone. Helmholtz's definition of dissonance eventually threatens his own theory of hearing, which is based on the mechanical principle of resonance and considers sound to be composed of sinusoidal waves. Both the physical and the mathematical tools he uses cannot easily be brought into accordance with his experimental findings on beats, which ask for a discrimination of fast changes in intensity. Dissonance thus becomes “unrecomendable” for Helmholtz, because it overstrains the ear. Stumpf's research, in contrast, has its point of departure in the historically given set of intervals and tries to find a principle that would explain this choice. His tests with experimental subjects who have no conscious knowledge of musical harmony and prove incapable to follow or reproduce music reveals to him a difference between the unity and multiplicity of tones. (shrink)