Getting started with music psychology

Music psychology is a relatively new discipline of study, especially compared to other fields of music scholarship, such as musicology or music history. Some say that the study of music psychology began with Leonard Meyer's 'Emotion and Meaning in Music' of 1956, but a more general consensus is that the field blossomed after the publication of Lerdahl and Jackendoff's 'A Generative Theory of Tonal Music' in 1983. Since 1983, new studies, theories, academic journals and labs in universities and conservatoires around the world have sprung up, and the field is thriving.

If you'd like to learn more about music psychology and what scholarship has explored and discovered so far, I have suggested resources below that you can explore.

Useful Introductory texts

Here are some useful introductions to lots of different music psychology topics

Academic Journals

Academic journals that are focussed on music psychology

Music Psychology labs across the world

There are some universities and conservatoires around the world that are renowned for their world-leading music psychology research

Other tips

A few other ideas of how you can get to know the wonderful world of music psychology research

Useful introductory texts:

Thompson, 'Music, Thought and Feeling'
Hallam, Cross and Thaut (eds.) 'The Oxford Guide to Music Psychology'

Academic journals:

Psychology of Music
Music & Science
Musicae Scientiae
Music Perception

Music psychology labs around the world:

LIVELab, McMaster, Hamilton Toronto, Canada
Amsterdam
Durham University Music & Science lab
Grahn lab, Canada
Ohio
Margulis' lab
Mish Mash, Oslo, Norway
Jyvaskyla, Finland

If you are looking for a place to study music psychology, there are some courses listed here.

Other resources

Music acoustics research and media articles

Campbell, M., and Greated, C. (2001), The Musician's Guide to Acoustics (Oxford, OUP)
Music Acoustics, Physics, Science, UNSW - music acoustics lab at University of New South Wales
News article from The Guardian (Feb 2025): Are noise-cancelling headphones impairing our hearing? Some audiologists are beginning to worry

Statistics and methods

Andrew Stewart's (free) 'Andrew's Workshops on R, Open Research, and Reproducibility'
Free online 'Guide to Effect Sizes and Confidence Intervals'
Stanford University 'Intro to Statistics' (free)
Open University 'Bayesian Statistics' (free)
FAIRsharing - useful resource for sharing data
RITMO, University of Oslo, training course on Pupillometry: The Eye as a Window Into the Mind (Future Learn, 6 week course)
RITMO, University of Oslo, training course on Motion Capture: The Art of Studying Human Activity (Future Learn, 6 week course)

Music psychology organisations

ESCOM - ESCOM is an international non-profit society to promote theoretical, experimental and applied research in the cognitive sciences of music.

SMPC - a scholarly organization dedicated to the study of music cognition.

ICMPC - The International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC) is an interdisciplinary conference devoted to the dissemination of new, unpublished research relating to the field of music perception and cognition.

NEMuR - the Northern Network for Empirical Music Research (NEMuR). NEMuR is a group of researchers in the North of England who are engaged in empirical research that is on, with, or for music and musicians.

SEMPRE The Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research, which embraces research in both music education and music psychology.

For tips for those beginning a PhD click here.