Reddit reviews Emotion and Meaning in Music (Phoenix Books)

Yep: Emotion and Meaning in Music, by Leonard B. Meyer and The Language of Music, by Deryk Cooke

You have a lot of questions in this question! Wonderful. To try to make it easier, I'm going to answer some of your questions out of order.

>Is rhythm purely psychological[?].

The way you are describing some of the phenomena here leads me to infer that you are talking about meter and not rhythm (although there is still not 100% agreement between rhythm & timing researchers) Justin London in his book Hearing in Time explains it very simply: "meter is how you count time, and rhythm is what you count--or what you play while you are counting." For the purposes of the first bit of discussion, I will focus on meter.

Maintaining London's explanation, meter is a behavior (the how) we impose on what we hear (the rhythm) in order to generate expectations and to "check" temporally variant (as in, changing timings and rhythms) inputs against our own temporally invariant (as in, our sense of beat). To answer the question, [meter] is psychological in the sense that its a way we organize periodic inputs of sound (but also can occur in other modalities, such as vision or touch.

I highly recommend London's webpage here because it is so easy to understand what he is talking about. However, the psychological literature on meter, rhythm, and timing is VAST.

>Why, when listening to a 4/4 chord progression, does the song seem to 'peak' just as the count (or 4/4 cycle) repeats?

Continuing to interpret in the style of London, the peaking you may be referring to is your sense of expectation (a part of your imposed meter behavior). It is commonly thought that expectations and their violations might be one of the strongest contributors to felt musical emotions, and is of great interest to researchers (see here, here and here). In line with Huron (2nd link in previous sentence), the sense of anticipation is very strong before the onset of where we might expect the downbeat to be, and when the downbeat occurs in the place we expect it to be, it is presumed to be rewarding. This is also assisted by our sense of tracking the chord progression--or harmonic rhythm. For example, if we are already imposing our 4/4 metric behavior, and we have a bunch of harmonic information, lets say the chord progression I-V-vi-IV in pop music, our sense of IV to I (very common in pop) helps us set up an expectation of I being the next chord, on beat 1 of the subsequent measure. As you can see, concerted expectations in both temporal and spectral dimensions can help guide behavior and anticipate what may come next. Keep in mind that these kinds of combinatorial things vary with culture, but metric and beat-related behaviors seem to be ubiquitous.

>scientific reason why we love to headbang?

Motivations behind music-induced movement (foot tapping, head banging, etc) is HUGE right now in music cognition; may researchers are probing everything from vestibular activation to entrainment are being explored. The bottom line is, rhythm, timing and movement are strongly linked (Clarke, 1999 in Deutsch, Ed. and ability to induce a periodic pulse activate brain regions (cerebellum, SMA, structures of the basal ganglia) that are implicated in human movement (see the work of Jessica Grahn. If I were to answer your question in short, we headbang because we find it pleasurable, and what accounts for the variability of why we find it pleasurable (entrainment, social reasons, expectations, agency) is still being worked out.

>I know it's due to the numbers of beats in a measure, but what, scientifically, is a measure? What's a beat?

I'll use London again because he explains it so damn well without having all these complicated notions that rhythm and timing researchers have to deal with, like dynamical attending, non-linear oscillators, and the like. Read through this page since it is both accessible to most readers and also acceptable scientifically, and coincides with the majority of research on the topic. In a nutshell, a beat is a "by-product of entrainment", which is our ability to synchronize with a periodic stimulus; a beat is kind of an event to which we entrain. Loosely, a measure is 'one period' of a periodic stimulus, or groups of beats.

>In a similar vein, are there numbers to show the difference between 3/4 and 4/4?

At the end of the day, these are just two employed behaviors we use to track time-varying events based on our ability to entrain to periodic events. In line with the definitions presented, they are just two different meters, and depending of the culture, 4/4 and 3/4 (or any meter) is used differently.

>Why do certain groups of sounds of certain lengths 'fit,' and others don't?

I think you might need to go into specifics with this one, since there are many several things--timing variability, the level of entrainment we are able to do, style of music--that are factors here.

Rhythm and rhythmic timing is my, I guess subdiscipline, so if you have any more Q's, recommendations to more literature, or if anything is unclear, feel free to ask.

EDIT: broken links

>i tested a few

What testing methodologies did you employ? I find double blind to be significant in this regard.

>the other one had voices, voices sound, or what you ppl call acapella, i hate acapella, hate all acapella versions of regular songs

Which one was A capella? Which by the way originally meant to wear a small cloak.

>it's just noise

Yes. The Rest is Noise

>it just had no meaning

This might help. Or this. Especially chapter 8.