1. PSYCHOLOGY OF
MUSIC
Prepared by: Jenny Gapoy
Geraldine Reyes
Michael Bravo

3.  Studies indicate that music
can have profound
physical and psychological
effects not only on people
but also on animals and
plants.

5. Music psychology, or the psychology of
music, may be regarded as a branch
of psychology, a branch of musicology or as a
field integrating with clinical music therapy. It
aims to explain and understand musical
behavior and musical experience. Modern
music psychology is mainly empirical: music-
psychological knowledge tends to advance
primarily on the basis of interpretations of
data about musical behavior and
experience, which are collected by systematic
observation of and interaction with human
participants.

6. Music, Mice and Madness
A student named David Merrill devised an
experiment to discover how music would
affect the ability of mice to learn new things.
Music, Intelligence and Learning
According to the Association for
Psychological Science, intelligence test scores
grew higher in children who took lessons in
keyboarding or singing. In another
study, boys between the ages of 6 and 15
who took music lessons scored higher on
tests of verbal memory than a control group
of students without musical training.

8. Music and Pain Reduction
Researchers found that patients who listened to
harp, piano, synthesizer, orchestra or slow jazz
experienced less post-surgical pain than those who
did not.
Music Therapy and Autism
Music therapy is particularly helpful for autistic
students, who have difficulty interacting with
classmates and teachers and become agitated in
noisy, changeable environments.
Music and Violence
In a study of university students, participants listened
to seven songs with violent lyrics, while a control
group listened to seven songs without violent lyrics
by the same artists.
Music and Plant Health
Experiments conducted by Dorothy Retallack to learn
about music's effects on plants are described in her
1973 book The Sound of Music and Plants.

11. Music psychologists investigate all aspects of musical
behavior by applying methods and knowledge from all
aspects of psychology. Topics of study include for example:
 Perception of musical sounds
 Perception of sound patterns
 Memory for music
 Absolute pitch
 everyday music listening (while
driving, eating, shopping, reading...)
 musical rituals and gatherings
(religious, festive, sporting, political...)
 the specific skills and processes involved in learning a
musical instrument or singing in a choir
 musical behaviors such as dancing and responding
emotionally to music
 development of musical behaviours and abilities
throughout the lifespan
 the role of music in forming personal and group identities

12.  preferences: the reasons why we like
some music genres and not others
 Social influences on musical preference
(peers, family, experts, social background, etc.)
 the structures that we hear within music:
melody, phrasing, harmony, tonality, rhythm, me
ter, danceability, BPM, or quasilinguistic elements
such as syntax
 the psychological processes involved in musical
performance, including:
◦ music reading, including eye movement in music reading
◦ improvisation
◦ the interpersonal/social aspects of group performance
◦ the composition/arrangement of music on paper or with
the aid of computers