Music and Memory: An Introduction

Rating:
Summary: An outstanding introduction to issues in music and memory.
Review: Written textbook style, Snyder's Music and Memory surveys what was previously the largely disparate literature linking cognitive psychology, linguistics, music, neuroscience, and memory. Accessible to the beginner in this interdisciplinary field, Snyder takes effort to introduce musical concepts and terminology before moving to higher level analyses. However, the expert in this field will still find many interesting bits of information regarding current papers on music and memory in these introductory chapters. As the book progresses, the scale of the ideas becomes more grandiose, but Snyder manages to support his tenets about the brain and music well. The chapters are sometimes divided by topic (like rhythm, or syntactic hierarchy in music). This enormous undertaking succeeds admirably -- and even if you are not a cognitive musicologist, you will find many interesting bits of information about this book about why you remember that certain song you've heard on the radio or TV. A+++.