8. The future

Abstract

From its disparate roots in diverse fields, the psychology of music has coalesced since the 1980s into a cohesive research area. Yet some of music’s most compelling mysteries remain elusive. “The future” explores how the psychology of music occupies an intriguing nexus among the arts, the humanities, and the sciences. This capacity for interplay and flexible thinking seems ever more critical to the broad challenges of the twenty-first century. Current and future areas of research include corpus studies using digital tools to identify patterns in large repertoires of music, harnessing the increasing power of neuroscience to understand the circuitry that underlies musical memory in greater detail, and more sophisticated cross-cultural approaches.