Ethnompson Chapter 1 Summary

This week’s music tech focused reading was on cognition. Cognition deals with how we understand music and it’s relationship/or correlation to our feelings, language and ideas. The four chapters that we read (1,2, 5 and 6) by William Thompson in his book ‘Music, Thought, and Feelings; Understanding the Psychology of Music,’ discussed the sub-disciplines in music cognition, introduces controversies and arguments within the field, the origins and evolution of music, the perception of sound, and the correlation between music and emotions. In Chapter one, Thompson highlights, during the course of outlining the following chapters, the main sub-disciplines in the field of music cognition. These sub-disciplines include musicology (the history, origins and development of music)- from this one can infer that ethnomusicology would also play a large role in cognition especially when evaluating the development of music in specific cultures, psychology (the use music to convey emotion (i.e. movies, TV, etc.) and how music effects one’s emotions), and neuroscience (how music effect the brain, and how the brain interprets sound). In addition, Thompson discusses some of the controversies in the field including the relationship between music psychology and cognition - how music psychology can be best explained and the methods

Some of the theories discussed include: the idea of music and our need for survival- in short, this theory basis is that music is in our genetic makeup, it is something that we adapted to because at some point in the evolution process music became essential and crucial to our survival aid in the capacity to attract mates and/or even create social bonds. This by no means seems farfetched as history shows how music in some cultures (even in black America during the slave period) was used as a means of