Editorial

According to Web of Science^TM (WOS), Music Perception has published 1,213 articles. In the WOS database on August 1, 2022, there were 29,540 total citations with an average citation of 24.35 per item. The journal has a WOS h-index of 80.

The journal is a cherished repository of seminal contributions and findings in our interdisciplinary field. The 10 articles that are cited most highly according to WOS are:

1. Perception of temporal patterns (Povel & Essens, 1985)

2. A cross-cultural investigation of the perception of emotion in music: Psychophysical and cultural cues (Balkwill & Thompson, 1999)

3. Effects of musical tempo and mode on arousal, mood, and spatial abilities (Husain, Thompson, & Schellenberg, 2002)

4. The emotional sources of “chills” induced by music (Panksepp, 1995)

5. A perceptual model of pulse salience and metrical accent in musical rhythms (Parncutt, 1994)

6. Uses of music in everyday life (North, Hargreaves, & Hargreaves, 2004)

7. Being together in musical time: Musical experience and the mirror neuron system (Overy & Molnar-Szakacs, 2009)

8. Music cognition and perceptual facilitation – A connectionist framework (Bharucha, 1987)

9. A model of expressive timing in tonal music + duration structure and rubato on the piano (Todd, 1985)

10. A comparison of acoustic cues in music and speech for three dimensions of affect (Ilie & Thompson, 2006).

As a doctoral student in 1988 and for some years beyond, I had a sense of being across most—if not all—articles relevant to my areas of interest and the field of music perception and music psychology broadly. As the field has developed and matured, specializations that are both narrow and deep have formed. These include music and emotion, rhythm and timing, pitch and tonal structures, timbre, musical development, expertise, aptitude and experience, movement and music, computational modeling, memory, imagery, creativity, cross-cultural perception and cognition.

What has changed since the 1980s? Technologies used to create stimuli, conduct experiments, musical and acoustic analyses, approaches to statistics, and digital means for preparing, submitting, publishing, and reading articles. Commercial academic publishing—dominated by a small number of large publishing companies—has embraced automation, user pay models, and profits.

What hasn’t changed, importantly, is curiosity and search for knowledge, striving for precision in design, measurement and analysis, the elegance of theory and explanation, building upon the foundation of colleagues’ work, interdisciplinarity, and the academy’s intellectual generosity that is often so evident through the process of manuscript reviews.

The University of California Press relies on subscriptions from institutions and libraries. Such a model helps the publication be free of major fees for the author, but the articles are behind a paywall. Pleasingly, UC Press permits wide distribution and sharing of articles by authors through personal, institutional, and subject repositories.

Volumes 1 to 39 of Music Perception are tangible evidence of the accumulating and deepening of knowledge in our field. This, coupled with an openness to societal and cultural shifts, means that the journal is as vital and dynamic as ever. For example, we are seeing the importance of review papers that organize and frame the now substantial body of work on the perception of music.

We see the deployment of ever more sophisticated, subtle yet precise methods to stimulate, engage, measure, and analyze human and animal perception, cognition, production, and performance.

We see methods, technologies, and tools that permit bold research designs with greater ecological validity, and that elicit, document, and analyze group and audience reactions, real-time performer interactions, and the perception and performance of dyads, trios, and larger ensembles.

We see an expectation for open science wherein researchers—especially those using empirical and quantitative methods—are encouraged to pre-register their literature review, hypotheses, methods and proposed analyses, to consider replication, and provide ready access to datasets. These expectations uphold integrity in research as well as the translation of knowledge, where possible, for society’s benefit.

And we see a worldwide call for research questions, stimulus materials, and methods that are inclusive, accessible, and equitable. Diversity and representativeness are called for in the topics of research, populations and sampling, stimulus materials, authors, reviewers, editorial boards, and datasets.

It appears then, that there is still much work to do, to address, redress, probe, debate, and progress. Music Perception welcomes review articles, commentaries on hot topics and published articles, proposals for special issues, registered reports, accessible datasets, and research that is representative and reflects the diversity of our world, its communities, and music.

We have increased gender equity and broadened career-stage among the journal’s boards. There is much more we can do. A process calling for expressions of interest to engage in the journal’s work will be rolled out.

The journal’s scope concerns the perception and cognition of music in composing, improvising, playing, performing, recalling, recognizing, teaching, learning, and responding to music through single or multiple modalities. Rigorous accounts of music perception through multi-experiment studies including replication, critical reviews, theory-driven applied research, cross-cultural research, multimodal perception, music information retrieval, AI, human-computer interaction, and a range of methods including cognitive neuroscience, human movement science, computational, and mixed methods, are encouraged.

In my first editorial in 2017 I looked forward to interdisciplinary research that can result from a challenge to the unidimensional and an emergence of entirely new questions and paradigms at the interstitial, the edges of disciplines as they collide. An expectation for representation and visibility in our sampling, stimuli, and research questions can also be a catalyst for interdisciplinarity. Such work can be hard, it takes time, and requires patience to build shared language and understanding, relationships, and trust. That time is now. I invite ideas and submissions that break ground, collaboratively find new research problems, co-design inclusive approaches, and lead the next step-change in a diverse and representative understanding and experience in the perception of music.