The magazine, Time , commenting on my new book, The Psychology of Music [A] , spoke approvingly of the scientific contributions to music, but gibed that, "psychologists have not explained why we love music." As a reply to that I wrote a note, Why Do We Love Music? [B] This seemed to call for a wider excursion implementing the views there taken, as in the present Chapter I. That, in turn, led to the writing of the remainder of this volume, in which each chapter deals with some of the salient fact

Organic response. Man is born with a psychophysical organism which registers sounds and responds to them somewhat like a resonator, which selects, amplifies and aids in the integration of auditory impressions. Our whole organism responds to sound involving the central and peripheral nervous system, all the muscles, all the internal organs, and especially the automatic nervous system with its endocrines, which furnish the triggers in the physical generation of emotion. Experiments from various so

What we are called upon to explain then in the attraction for musical art is essentially the motives which drive man to the creation, appreciation, and performance of music. One of these motives is the love of knowledge as a thing in itself, the understanding of what is, and the power of passing from vantage ground to vantage ground in the logical creation, appreciation, and execution of art forms. Musical knowledge. This love of music for its cognitive value can be traced from the earliest musi

The psychology of music and the psychology of the child are giving us new vital conceptions of the nature and role of music in child life. To understand this fully is to understand adequately the nature of the child mind and the nature of music. From smile to music. All mental development begins with some inherited form of behavior and gradually differentiates into richer and richer meanings and forms of expression. The taproot of all music is the smile. This in its first appearance is a pure re

C . This outline was prepared by May E. Peabody, Supervisor, when it appeared in Parents' Magazine . It seemed to me so stimulating for thought about the reading that I have adopted this general plan for all the chapters in this volume. C. E. S. The question " When should music education begin?" is now coming to be " How should music education begin?"; because we now recognize that music should play a large role in the first five years of child life. Soon after six the child enters school. Here

There is a distinctively musical period in life: the period of youth. Youth is the age of emotional response and of social awakening, the age of serious play, the age of decision and elimination, the dominant learning period, and the age of freedom and leisure. Before this period the life of the child has been relatively tranquil. After this period the occupational affairs of life are more exacting. Before this period most children participate in music in a routine way without professing it. Aft

The emotional age. For the present purpose we may think of youth as represented by the age of the teens, usually beginning in the high school. It is a brief period of storm and stress, emotional awakening and emotional struggles, in which the various emotional drives, more or less latent before, assert themselves, often to cool off or to be attenuated in later life. The older psychologists spoke of it as a period of rebirth, the passing from the period of protected and directed life into the eme

During the present century most extraordinary progress has been made in the provision of musical facilities for youth by the recognition of music as an academic subject, by the early and vital training in the grades, by the development of group activities in voice and instrument as a dominant extracurricular activity, by the motivation of training through opportunities for public performance and contest, and by the popularization of music through phonograph and radio. Up to the end of the past c

What makes a musician temperamental? Tell a musician he is temperamental, and he will take offense. Yet perhaps the thing in his personality of which he is most proud is the possession of a musical temperament. This characteristic inconsistency has a basis in psychological fact; namely, that the exhibition of artistic temperament frequently leads to attitudes and actions which the rest of the world may criticize and view with amusement; but, on the other hand, the finest expressions of musicians

When the director of the professional symphony orchestra faces a group of temperamentally hardened performers in rehearsal it is war to the finish—victory or defeat. Recall some characteristic historical instances of artistic strategy in such a situation. The whole problem of mental inheritance is in the air, both in the sense that it is current and in the sense that it is relatively intangible. The struggle is best illustrated in the current approaches to the problem of inheritance of intellige

The mechanism of heredity lies in a single germ cell carrying the character-determining chromosomes which consist of organized chains of genes. In the character and organization of these genes in the fertilized cell we find the complete "blueprint" for the future individual in so far as it is to be determined by heredity. In the twenty-four pairs of chromosomes in the fertilized human germ cell we find the long and diversified heritage of each parent represented through the union of the sperm an

The music geneticist can approach many significant aspects of the subject through psychophysical experiments for which we now have fairly standardized procedures. For the present purpose, we may call this measurement of the second order as compared with the anatomical and physiological measurements. It proceeds out of, and is a complement to, the anatomical and physiological foundations and probably represents the most fundamental approach from the psychological and musical points of view. These

Are we nearing the end of the "horse-and-buggy" stage of musical instruments? Can the possibilities for revolutionary procedures now looming up in the construction of musical instruments be as strategic for music as were the principles embodied in the coming of the automobile and the airplane for transportation? Those of us who remember that faithful animal and servant of man, the horse, and the conveyances he served, look back with fond appreciation upon what amounted to a sort of fellowship wi

We can now foresee that musical instruments will be submitted to critical analysis, with improvements even on the very best; that substitute forms in great variety may be developed for any now available musical instrument; that new instruments will be designed for the production of new tone qualities and other musical effects; that new ensembles may be built for any number or kind of instrument, so that it is within the bounds of possibility that the entire performance of the symphony orchestra,

The improvement of old instruments and the introduction of new ones will call for an unprecedented revision of old music and a creation of new. When music was written for the well-tempered clavichord it was limited to the resources of that instrument. The same is true of music for all instruments. The music had to be limited to the available resources of the instrument. It is reasonable to suppose that composers will respond from time to time with up-to-date adaptations and new creations, taking

As in the automobile, for example, the tendency is to make everything automatic and relieve the human control of effort, we are moving fast in the direction of creating automatic devices in musical instruments. It is safe to predict that a variety of instruments for children will be more easily played than at present, and that even for the virtuoso a number of the factors which have been difficult to control will be simplified and mechanized. This will be particularly true in ensemble instrument

The musical medium whether in art or nature has four, and only four, elements; namely, pitch, loudness, time, and timbre. These are four characteristics which may be expressed in terms of the sound wave, as frequency of waves, intensity of waves, duration of waves, and form of waves. The recognition of this fact vastly simplifies the mastery of tone production in musical instruments. Let us consider the factors which may be classified under these four heads. Pitch. New devices for the control of

Music is unique among esthetic appeals in that it demands immediate response in the form of praise or blame. The orator demands immediate response; but his appeal is to reasoning, not to feeling. The painter, sculptor, and poet demand esthetic response, but this response is delayed and does not keep the artist on the tip of his nerves to receive it. The musical appeal is all the more emotional because it is not only an appeal for personal recognition but for the aggrandizement of the noble art.

Artistic insight. The extraordinarily rapid introduction of real music education in the grades and in the high school and college curricula, and even in graduate study, is changing the attitude of the listener by increasing his competence. Children and youth now hear more good music and hear it presented in such a way as to increase their understanding of it. At the college level music is presented as an academic subject, with primary emphasis upon the art of hearing music together with some kno

The pupil. Modern education has revealed the importance of a student-centered and student-originated learning process as opposed to the traditional and institutional direction of development of the individual. The question of self-praise and self-blame, satisfaction or dissatisfaction on the part of the child or youth, is of course of first importance both in the initial stages of orientation and throughout the course of specialization and achievement. Instead of imposing regimentation, the home

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