Music Perception and Cognition
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this graduate-level survey of how the brain processes music, covering pitch, timbre, loudness, consonance and roughness, and auditory grouping as the building blocks of melody, harmony, and rhythm. Lectures examine the temporal side of music cognition, including timing, duration, and rhythmic expectation, alongside neurophysiological evidence for how these percepts are represented in the brain. Special topics include comparative and developmental psychology of music, biological versus cultural explanations for musical universals, competing Gestaltist, associationist, and schema-based theories of perception, and parallels between music and language processing. The course includes a syllabus, readings drawn from psychology and neuroscience literature, and assignments, all freely downloadable through MIT OpenCourseWare with no certificate offered. It suits students with some background in psychology or cognitive science who want a research-grounded look at why music sounds and feels the way it does.