Publication Title

Journal of the Royal Musical Association

Document Type

Article

Department or Program

Music

Publication Date

10-1-2023

Abstract

This study relies on the prevalence of certain structures that largely distinguish the creation and reception of music from that of language - namely, temporal grids, scalar grids, and segments with their repetitions - to construct a model of the human cognitive faculty for music that allows humans to make music the way they do. The study draws on research and thought in philosophy (including phenomenology), linguistics, psychology, and neurology, coupled with musicology, to produce a model of a human capacity to make complex comparisons between ongoing sound sequences and those simultaneously reconstructed from memory by registering the relativities within their flow. This model is then used in a consideration of how the faculty for music interacts with the faculty for language in the experience of song and a consideration of how a similar cognitive capacity for music might be identified in other species.

Comments

Original version is available from the publisher at: https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2024.1

Copyright Note

This is the publisher's version of the work. This publication appears in Bates College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution.

Required Publisher's Statement

© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Musical Association

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