Music and Mind in Everyday Life

Music pervades everyday life - in homes, on trains and planes, in cars and shops, at births and deaths, at weddings and war, in concert halls, clubs, stadiums, and fields. In so many ways, music marks and orchestrates the ways in which people experience the world together. What is it that makes people want to live their lives to the sound of music, and why do so many of our most private experiences and most public spectacles incorporate - or even depend on - music? Music and Mind in Everyday Lifeuses psychology to understand musical behaviour and experience in a range of circumstances, including composing and performing, listening and persuading, and teaching and learning. Starting from 'real world' examples of musical experiences, it critically examines the ways in which psychology can explain people's diverse experience of, and engagement with music, focusing on how music is used, acquired, and made in a range of familiar musical contexts. Using a framework of real and imagined musical scenarios, the book draws on a wide range of research in the psychology of music and music education. The book is organized into three central sections. In "Making Music," it tackles the psychology of playing, improvising, and composing music, understood as closely related and integrated activities. In Using Music the authors address the ways in which people listen to music, manage their emotions, moods, and identities with music, and use music for therapy, persuasion and social control. In "Acquiring Music," they consider music in human development, and in a range of more formal and informal educational contexts. The final chapter provides an overview of the history and preoccupations of music psychology as a discipline, and concludes with some remarks on the wider significance of music psychology for an understanding of human subjectivity. Drawing on a wide range of research in music psychology and music education, the book will make fascinating reading for musicians and music scholars, as well as those in the fields of music psychology and music education.

Eric Clarke is Heather Professor of Music at the University of Oxford. He has published on topics including the psychology of performance, the perception and production of musical rhythm, 6music and meaning, music and ecological theory, and the impact of recording on listening. He is the author of Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (OUP, 2005) and is co-editor (with Nicholas Cook) of Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects.
Dr. Nicola Dibben is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Sheffield. Her research is in the broad area of music, mind and culture. She has published numerous articles on music cognition and emotion, representations of gender in music, and popular music and has a book forthcoming in 2009 on the popular musician Bjork.
Dr. Stephanie Pitts is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Sheffield. She has research interests in music education and psychology, and is the author of two books including Valuing Musical Participation (2005), a study of adults' amateur involvement in music.