Principles of Music Perception

Explore the fascinating world of music perception in this comprehensive lecture from Harvard University's Sam Mehr. Delve into groundbreaking research demonstrating how music can reliably convey information to listeners, even when encountering unfamiliar foreign compositions. Examine studies involving adults, children, and infants that reveal implicit and explicit responses to music, suggesting the existence of fundamental representational systems. Investigate two key candidates for these systems: tonal perception, which contextualizes pitch input within a tonal hierarchy, and metrical perception, which organizes temporal input into rhythmic groupings. Discover how these universal, early-developing, and uniquely human systems combine with higher-level musical structures and other cognitive domains to shape our understanding of music. Gain insights into the genetic and neural correlates supporting these perceptual systems, and explore their implications for human psychology and musicality.