Abstract
The study of musical expertise within musicology is underpinned by the long-held Romantic concept of genius. This has influenced the topics explored and methods chosen and has promoted an unsubstantiated notion of musical expertise as elusive, innate, all-or-nothing, beneficial, and creative. The focus has been on social contexts, while cognitive and physiological traits have been less considered. Recent expertise findings from experimental psychology and neuroscience studies show that such traits may shed some new light on the matter. Based on anticipatory expertise – i.e. our ability to predict musical continuation – this paper outlines a research framework comprising seven analytical perspectives (origin, mental representations, anticipatory certainty, anticipatory flexibility, conscious availability, memory components, neural correlates). Each of these comes with a corresponding research question, a distinct view on musical learning, and a set of methods drawing, for instance, on advanced computational modelling, psychological experiments, and modern neuroimaging techniques. The proposed framework may help reshape our understanding of what characterises musical expertise. Further, it has implications for the development of strategies for music teaching, practising and dissemination as well as for the understanding of past, present and future music reception processes.
| Translated title of the contribution | New perspectives on the scientific study of musical expertise |
|---|---|
| Original language | Danish |
| Book series | Dansk Musikforskning Online |
| Volume | Special Issue 2015: Music and Brain Research |
| Pages (from-to) | 69-102 |
| Number of pages | 33 |
| ISSN | 1904-237X |
| Publication status | Published - 28 Jul 2015 |