Role of musical psychology in organization of musical education

The role of music psychology in the organization of music education

Musical psychology is a scientific discipline that studies various psychological aspects of the musical language and the structure of musical works, as well as investigates the patterns of psychological perception of music and its impact on various structural components of the human psyche.

Musical psychology is an interdisciplinary science, belonging both to the field of musicology and to the field of applied psychology. Therefore, developments in the field of musical psychology can, for example, include various specialized studies in the field of musical acoustics, psychoacoustics, neuropsychology of perception, psychophysiology of hearing and movement, aesthetics, cultural studies, pedagogy, etc.

The main areas of research in the field of musical psychology are as follows:

• •    psychology of musical abilities;

• •    psychology of musical ear;

• •    psychology of music perception;

• •    psychology of musical creativity;

• •    psychological aspects of musical phenomena.

The problem of musical psychology as such was considered at all stages of the development of musical art, starting from the times of early antiquity.

Of considerable interest from the point of view of the development of musical psychology is the Theory of Affects, which arose in the Baroque Era, the main developers of which were Johannes Quantz, Maren Mersenne, Athanasius Kircher, Johann Walter, Claudio Monteverdi, Johann Matteson, Giovanni Bononcini and Christian Spies. According to the Theory of Affects, the goal of composer's creativity is to excite affects, for the groups of which certain musical styles and other means of composer writing were assigned. According to Afanasy Kircher, the transmission of affects was not limited to any purely artisan techniques, but was a kind of magical action to control the “sympathy” “arising between man and music”. In this regard, it should be noted that many composers of that era were specially trained in magic, including the largest of them, Claudio Monteverdi.

But it was precisely as an independent scientific discipline that musical psychology began to take shape from the middle of the 19th century. The main impetus for this was research in the field of experimental psychophysiology and the development of a scientific theory of musical and auditory perception, which is in its final form formulated in the works of Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, directly related to these studies. Helmholtz developed the resonance theory of hearing, according to which auditory sensations arise in a person due to the resonance of the internal organs of hearing in response to external influences. Another innovative idea of Helmholtz was the provision that a single sound is a kind of chord, the sound of which is based on well-defined laws of acoustics. In his "theory of consonance and dissonance, Helmholtz explained many important phenomena from the field of psychoacoustics by the occurrence of beats between partial and combination tones: the largest number of such beats is observed in dissonant intervals (seconds, tritons, septims), the smallest - in consonant intervals (octaves, fifths).

Helmholtz's research touched upon various scientific and practical issues related to the problems of perception, creativity, diagnostics of abilities, methods of musical education, which gave a powerful impetus to the development of almost all areas of musical psychology.

Many of Helmholtz's ideas were then taken up, and his developments were creatively interpreted in the works of K. Stumpf, O. Abraham, M. Meyer, E. Mach.

Karl Stumpf viewed music as a unique cultural phenomenon, and therefore the results of experiments carried out by psychologists trained in introspective analysis of consciousness (W. Wundt's school), as more trustworthy, he opposed the evidence of expert musicians.

One of the main concepts of Stumpf's psychology of sound is the "fusion" of sounds: a plurality of sounds that form a single, integral consonance in the minds of listeners. In this approach, dissonance is seen as the "individuation" of sounds from this unity.

Stumpf made the largest contribution to the study of psychological acoustics after Helmholtz. But, unlike Helmholtz, Stumpf opposed "objective methods" of research, thus declaring the idea of the impossibility of a strict distinction between physical and mental phenomena, which presupposed the need to study integral psycho-physical complexes in the field of psychoacoustics.

• K . Stumpf laid the foundations for the concept of "two components of the pitch of a musical sound", according to which, with a change in one physical

parameter of a sound - the frequency of its vibrations - two psychological characteristics of a sound change simultaneously - its timbre and pitch.

A significant contribution to the development of musical psychology was also made by W. Wundt (who enriched musical psychology with the use of the methodological tools of experimental psychophysiology), W. Kohler (who brought the fundamental principles of Gestalt psychology into musical psychology , G. Reves (thoroughly researched the phenomenon of musical giftedness) and other famous scientists.

Music psychology is of scientific and practical interest in several aspects:

• -    in pedagogy, which deals with the education and training of musicians;

• -    in musicology, which, first of all, is connected with the problems of reflecting reality in music and showing the process of formation of artistic meaning in a piece of music;

• -    in the sociological and psychological, which is related to various laws of the existence of music in public consciousness;

• -    in the psychological proper, which interests scientists from the point of view of the most general tasks of studying the human psyche, his aesthetic needs and creative manifestations.

From a purely musicological point of view, the field of application of musical psychology encompasses all types of musical activity: composing music, performing music, perceiving music, musical theoretical analysis, and musical education.