Music, Gestalt, and Computing: Studies in Cognitive and Systematic Musicology

by Marc Leman (Editor), A. Camurri (Assistant), J. Louhivuori (Assistant)

This book presents a coherent state-of-the-art survey on the area of systematic and cognitive musicology which has enjoyed dynamic growth now for many years. It is devoted to exploring the relationships between acoustics, human information processing, and culture as well as to methodological issues raised by the widespread use of computers as a powerful tool for theory construction, theory testing, and the manipulation of musical information or any kind of data manipulation related to music.

540 pages, Paperback

First published October 29, 1997

About the author

Marc Leman is Methusalem Research Professor in Systematic Musicology at Ghent University and the author of Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology (MIT Press).

Reviews

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book contains 35 chapters on music psychology and computational analysis of the perception of music, concerning, e.g., tonal fusion, gestalt pschology, emotion, meter and rhythm perception, chord progression and the circle of fifth. Well-known researchers in the field, like Rolf-Inge Godoy, Carol Krumhansl, Marc Leman, Richard Parcutt, Christoph Reuter, and Albrecht Schneider contribute to the chapters.

This book is a pioneering work on the field of music information retrieval, with a much deeper insight into music theory, psychoacoustics and music perception than those books written by computer scientists who suggest some advanced methods from the field of artificial intelligence but often lack musical knowledge. The book suggest some inspiring features that are closely related to human music perception. Unfortunately, these features are widely ignored by the music information retrieval community.