Music and the Cognitive Sciences

Over the last decade, cognitive science has increasingly come to be seen as offering an appropriate framework within which to explore and to explain issues in musical listening, performance, composition, development and analysis. There are a number of reasons for this. As cognitive science develops, it provides progressively more and more sophisticated and plausible accounts of the phenomena of mental life. Moreover, cognitive science appears to offer frameworks of understanding (or at least modes of enquiry) which appear largely “culturally-neutral”.