New Horizons for Brain Research in Music

This final chapter of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Neuroscience tries to appraise potential new horizons for future brain-based research in music, including new trajectories in the neuroscience of music perception and production, clinical applications, music learning, musician health, and intersections of biology, culture, and aesthetics. The study of music as a science and an object of scientific inquiry has actually a long and rich history in human culture and the more prevalent belief that music should, as one of its primary functions, express and induce emotions, is a relatively recent one—firmly implanted only since the early nineteenth-century Romantic period (Berlyne, 1971). The evidence presented in the previous chapters has provided a comprehensive basis to shape a future architecture of basic and applied neuroscience research in music, whose outlines are sketched out here. Therefore, as a draft for future possibilities, this chapter contains few new references. The references for this chapter are the previous chapters.