Week 5: The Music Cognition Field

The field of music cognition is vast and promotes many questions about the study of the human development and understanding of music recognition. There are many different avenues in the field and at one University they have discovered tribal songs from the past. The Music Cognition Department at Ohio State University is leading a unique endeavor called the Densmore Project. The project is collecting Native American songs from some of the earliest tribes on the North American continent.

Frances Densmore originally collected the songs on monograph and the Music Cognition Department is focusing on creating a database that will allow students and patrons to search for the songs primarily by tribal name, region, and cultural region. Eventually the songs will be available to download. The concept is mind boggling as many people do not think about applying MP3 formats or podcasts to past civilizations and using modern technology to preserve music let alone be able to search through it.

It will be interesting to see how libraries continue to use the concept of preserving music through MP3s as current music comes out. Some questions music librarians must face today would be what types of music should and shouldn't be preserved? What dictates a song is a piece of art or history? There must be many different questions as music archiving advances.

Check out their site: http://www.musiccog.ohio-state.edu/Densmore/technical.html

In addition, week five's lesson introduced the different stages in which humans are able to perceive and register music cognitively. On the discussion board an article entitled "Babies Learn Music While Sleeping" from Science Daily introduced the concept of how and when we understand music. Something that caught my interest in this article was the explaination of Henkjan Honing of how if we as humans listen more to a specific genre we may have a better music knowledge and appreciation toward this genre even without any musical training.

This particular study makes me wonder that if the entire generation of Baby Einstein listeners or rather "Mozart Effect" children really do have a better musical upbringing in classical music than those that did not listen to classical music as a baby. The "Mozart Effect" is a concept introduced by Don Campbell which claims that babies who listen to Mozart will become brighter and more advanced. It looks like Honing's study may even agree with Campbell.

ICT Results(February 27, 2009).Babies learn music while sleeping. Science Daily. Retrieved June 11, 2009 from http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:RBKh1Yc4I4gJ:www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090226082517.htm+%22music+cognition%22+babies&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us