Elizabeth Margulis on the Importance of a Seminal Work of Popular Science on the Field of Music Cognition
Twenty years ago, when This Is Your Brain on Music was published, the idea that music could be studied with the tools of biology and neuroscience was a niche one. When it came out, I was junior faculty at Northwestern, working in one of the country’s only departments devoted to this topic (the department of “Music Theory and Cognition”). The field had only formally existed for something like twenty years. A scholarly organization, the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC), was founded in 1990, and an academic journal, Music Perception, in 1983.Article continues after advertisement
But most of the research being done was carried out by people who had the university equivalent of a day job. They were behavioral scientists who moonlighted as music researchers on the side, or music scholars who tried to sneak empirical methods into musicology conferences. To get grants from agencies like the National Science Foundation, you wouldn’t say you were researching music; you’d call it “complex nonlinguistic auditory processing.”
A book directed toward the general public might seem irrelevant to the progress of an academic field, but it can actually transform it.
