Cognition and emotion in music

Wherever there are human beings, music exists. It is in this sense that music is universal. Today, in many countries or communities, including Japan, music is associated with “art,”“entertainment”, or considered a “hobby.” Music is thus relegated to the realm of a “surplus” non-essential (even frivolous) activity. However, in a certain mountainous area in South-East Asia, young men are still required to spontaneously improvise a song in order to ask a woman to marry. For these young men, music is more than a recreational pursuit, it will ultimately determine their future lives. I believe that music, like language, is an essential part of our uniquely human endowment, making it both ubiquitous and inevitable. This special issue from the Japanese Psychological Association includes six studies on music cognition and music emotion. However, this issue has no special ethnological emphasis on Japanese traditional music. Most of the studies here deal with Western music, which was imported into Japan approximately 120 years ago, and is now prevalent. Of course, the traditional music is not so easily driven away from the community wherein it once had flourished. To a large extent, young Japanese people are exposed to the same music as young people in North America, yet some traditional music filters through for cultural reasons. Thus such music is not foreign to their ears, and Japanese come to hold “bi-musical” or “multimusical” schemas. This can be observed from the contents of the studies in this issue. As a cognitive psychologist, I believe that music is an integral part of what it is to be human, and that the exploration of music is akin to an exploration of the human mind. I hope this issue will provide some new information about the mind, through the rather new perspective window – music

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