Musical Cognition Quotes

Our bodies like rhythm and our brains like melody and harmony.

A musical education is necessary for musical judgement. What most people relish is hardly music; it is rather a drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills.

We are able to feel and learn very quickly through music, through art, through poetry some spiritual things that we would otherwise learn very slowly.

Music exists when rhythmic, melodic or harmonic order is deliberately created, and consciously listened to, and it is only language-using, self-conscious creatures ... who are capable of organizing sounds in this way, either when uttering them or when perceiving them. We can hear music in the song of the nightingale, but it is music that no nightingale has heard.

All musicians practice ear training constantly, whether or not they are cognizant of it. If, when listening to a piece of music, a musician is envisioning how to play it or is trying to play along, that musician is using his or her 'ear' - the understanding and recognition of musical elements - for guidance.

I believe that the brain has evolved over millions of years to be responsive to different kinds of content in the world. Language content, musical content, spatial content, numerical content, etc.

Music is essentially built upon primitive memory structures.

The way the mind decodes music is an individual mystery. But the physical circumstances can change the way you listen.

We've learned that musical ability is actually not one ability but a set of abilities, a dozen or more. Through brain damage, you can lose one component and not necessarily lose the others. You can lose rhythm and retain pitch, for example, that kind of thing.

It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.

It may well be easier to remember a list if one sings it (or dances to it). However, these uses of the 'materials' of an intelligence are essentially trivial. What is not trivial is the capacity to think musically.