Music Psychology

One of my main goals while teaching MUS2640 – Sensing Sound and Music last semester was the integration of perspectives from musicology, psychology, and technology. The main point is to introduce the basics of music psychology and music technology, two disciplines that are quite distinct in most places, but which we at the University of Oslo have a tradition of combining. In this post, I explain the rationale. Three “logies” One of my main arguments is that we should consider the three “logies” involved in this course: ...

This semester, I have written a book with AI. I should emphasize the with in the previous sentence, because this has been an experience of co-creation between various large language models (LLMs) and me. This post details my approach to co-writing Sensing Sound and Music and reflects on the process. The need for a book The reason for my AI-based writing experiment was the need for a textbook for the course MUS2640 – Sensing Sound and Music at the University of Oslo. This is an introductory course for the bachelor’s students in our musicology program who want to major in music psychology and/or music technology. These are two distinct directions that are usually taught separately. However, at UiO, we have a strong tradition of combining psychological and technological perspectives on and with music (in the fourMs Lab and at RITMO), so I have argued that we need a foundation course showing the connections between the two disciplines. ...

At the ESCOM conference a few years ago I heard about the Ollen Musical Sophistication Index (OMSI), which is a ten-question standardised test for evaluating musical skills. The test is the result of the PhD dissertation by Joy Ollen. When I first read about this test, I thought it would be interesting to have an interactive version available to use in studies. Fortunately, now I see that there is an online version available at the MARCS Auditory Laboratories,

Richard Parncutt is asking for response from ex-music psychology students for the Careers After Music Psychology survey. If you have studied music psychology at any time (even if just one course), we would be grateful for about 20 minutes of your valuable time. Please participate regardless of whether or not your current occupation involves music or psychology in any way. This questionnaire aims to document the careers of ex-students of music psychology to inform current students of music psychology about career opportunities to develop career-oriented strategies for teaching music psychology to promote music psychology among potential employers I am very much looking forward to seeing the results of this research, and I hope (and expect) that they find people to end up in a wide range of disciplines.

There is a new music journal out titled Journal of interdisciplinary music studies, and which seems to be freely available online. I was particularly pleased to read Richard Parncutt’s opening paper on the history and future of systematic musicology. While it has been overshadowed (and to some extent suppressed) by historical musicology for the last decade, there seems to be a growing interest for systematic musicology today. However, as Parncutt argues, much of this research is carried out under other names and in other departments, e.g. music psychology, music cognition, music technology, etc. Placing music psychology in a psychology department is like historical musicology should be placed in a history department, and ethnomusicology in social anthropology. Parncutt argues that it is important that all of these disciplines should be considered musicology and gathered in musicology departments to avoid musicology from totally breaking apart.