The University of Sheffield
Department of Music

Research in the Psychology of Music

Participants in a joint rhythm experimentWhat is Psychology of Music?

Research in the Psychology of Music uses psychological theories and methods to interpret and understand musical sounds, musical behaviours, and the effects of music. The subject is strongly inter-disciplinary, and makes use of a wide range of approaches – empirical, theoretical, discursive, and critical. The scope of the discipline ranges from understanding how music is picked up by sensory systems and understood (cognition and perception), through the acquisition of musical expertise (development and education), to uses of music in the world (social psychology); and all of these areas are represented in the current research of psychology of music staff at Sheffield. Staff expertise includes emotion and meaning in music, music perception and cognition, the study of performance, voice, the social psychology of music, musical participation and musical development.

Psychology of Music at Sheffield

The Psychology of Music, encompassing Music Education, is an important part of the Department's research profile, with three full-time permanent members of staff, regular visiting lecturers and associated research fellows/assistants active in this area. The department´s ethnomusicology staff provide additional geographical and theoretical expertise in music education, and cognitive ethnomusicology. The Department regularly hosts international conferences in music psychology, including meetings of SEMPRE (Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research), on themes including `Music and Consciousness´, `Musical Participation´, and `Music and Gender´. The research centre `Music Mind Machine in Sheffield’ plays a growing role in organising events and bringing together research from across the university. This summer it will host a summer school on `Musical understanding: philosophical, psychological and neuoroscientific approaches´ with guest lecturers from Finland, Scotland and Italy.

Staff and students regularly contribute as reviewers, session chairs and presenters at conferences around the world, notably the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), International Society of Music Education (ISME) and European Society for the Cognitive Science of Music (ESCOM). Members of staff also serve as editors and reviewers for leading journals in the field, including `Psychology of Music´, `British Journal of Music Education´, `Music Perception´, `Empirical Musicology Review´, and `Psychomusicology: Music Mind and Brain´, and with our students are regular contributors to these and other relevant journals.

The University of Sheffield has the longest established and biggest grouping of psychology of music expertise in the UK. In any single year we have approximately 10 research students working on psychology of music or music education projects, 30 students on our three taught MA programmes, and a number of research assistants and postdoctoral scholars. We have strong links with the Department of Psychology and other cognate departments, through joint supervision of postgraduate and undergraduate research projects, and through research collaborations between staff. Our research graduates have gone on to hold academic posts in UK universities and overseas, including Leeds, Liverpool John Moores, Durham, Royal College of Music, Teeside, Aveiro, Porto, Harvard and Canberra, and a variety of careers beyond academia, including music therapy, marketing and publishing.

Research funding for our work has come from The Arts and Humanities Research Council, The British Academy, PALATINE, Worldwide Universities Network, and the Royal Society. The Department has a number of specialist facilities to support this research, including digital performance instruments, equipment for physiological measurements, specialist library holdings, video equipment, and a high specification digital sound studio. Recent projects by staff and students have included

See the staff pages and the Music Mind Machine webpages for more detail about research projects.