Customer Reviews

Music and Memory: An Introduction

5 star:		(5)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Written textbook style, Snyder's Music and Memory surveys what was previously the largely disparate literature linking cognitive psychology, linguistics, music, neuroscience, and memory. Accessible to the beginner in this interdisciplinary field, Snyder takes effort to introduce musical concepts and terminology before moving to higher level analyses. However, the expert in this field will still find many interesting bits of information regarding current papers on music and memory in these introductory chapters. As the book progresses, the scale of the ideas becomes more grandiose, but Snyder manages to support his tenets about the brain and music well. The chapters are sometimes divided by topic (like rhythm, or syntactic hierarchy in music). This enormous undertaking succeeds admirably -- and even if you are not a cognitive musicologist, you will find many interesting bits of information about this book about why you remember that certain song you've heard on the radio or TV. A+++.

not much to add to Sean Bennett's review, which is very cogent, but just wanted to second the high ranking--this is a book that deserves to be acknowledged and read.

This is a very good introduction to the field of music cognition and memory. It provides interesting ideas about how cognitive psychology and perception determine the organization of music.

This book is for anyone interested in the construction of music, or any of the arts. It clarifies how we more easily understand things we are familiar with and how our memory works with repetition and the unusual. Outside of the arts we all know that our memories are not reliable this helps explain why.

This book gives the reader an accessible "glimpse behind the curtain" of the mechanisms involved in processing, perceiving, and recognizing music. Although the book is strictly about music, I felt that I was reading a users manual for the brain and that I would be able to apply the author's insights about music and psychology to other art forms and activities in my life.

This book will be helpful to me as a media artist, and I would guess that artists, performers, dancers and filmmakers---actually anybody who has to make decisions about timing, pacing and rhythm---would find this book helpful. As a teacher, I plan to change the amount of information and the order in which I present my materials to the students so that I don't overwhelm (or underwhelm!) their attention and ability.

This book explores hearing and memory from a highly technological view point. It is difficult for the average person even with a college degree to follow and renders one bored after only a few pages of trying to follow the tiny details in the book.