European music and arts have been continually moving towards higher degrees of sophistication and refinement leaving behind them the cultural waste-land of every-day life. In the 20th century we find an enormous gap between those two poles which to bridge should be the task of musicians as well as musicologists.

This investigation of music in living-rooms is part of a series of studies concerned with every-day aesthetic experiences. lt is settled on the border-line of psychology and aesthetics and may help to establish a new aesthetics. In an experiment observers had to match eight examples of music to twelve pictures showing people in their livingrooms. There was general agreement in matching music-examples to pictures. The slight variance can be explained by the different educational background of the subjects. A cluster-analysis revealed four types of preferences in the style of music and surroundings, which may be interpreted by help of the psychical and social nearness or remoteness of the observers. For further explanation verbal statements from a »life-world«-study of the author were used. These texts were selected by computer from a larger text.

The author gives a review of Debussy's relationship to the symbolist movement in France, then analyses in a psychoanalytical approach the aspects of time and death in the works of the composer. He begins by pointing out how the composer of Pelleas took over the archetypes of water, and of these archetypes organized the musical elements themselves, furthering the creation of open and irreversable forms. This propensity to change, over the flux of temporal progression, provides support for a musical form in which each moment, standing by itself, is in unrelated juxtaposition to the next, free of any planned continuity and direction. In this effort to isolate the present moment to retain it all the better, Debussy's style constitutes a genuine denial of death which may be found even in his unfinished works such as The Fall of the House of Usher; Debussy was unable to finish this work, as if the portrayal of death were unbearable for him. In his works, Debussy has excluded death forever.

In an experimental study the relationship between musical talent, including the ability to compose and/or improvise and visual spatial ability was investigated. There were 60 girls and 60 boys at the beginning of puberty. Three groups of 40 (20 girls and 20 boys) were compared: 1. children with musical talent and the ability to compose and/ or improvise; 2. children with musical talent without the ability to compose and/or improvise; 3. non-musicians as control group. Musical talent and the ability to compose and/or improvise was found to be significantly related to at least one spatial factor. Sex differences emerged. Girls with musical talent were significantly better than non-musician-girls in general intelligence; girls attained better evaluations than boys for their compositions/improvisations; 5 of 20 girls did not compose/improvise in the 2. investigation. In the boys' group more spatial factors related to musical talent were found than in the girls' ; in the boys' group we found a significant correlation between musical talent and androgyny; only 1 of 20 boys did not compose/improvise in our second investigation.

Kurth ( 1931) introduced the term »Musikpsychologie« (psychology of music) in opposition to the theoretical approach associated with the term »Tonpsychologie« (psychology of tone). His reasons for the programmatic usage of the new term are briefly reviewed, and it is argued that despite major theoretical differences the theoretically founded criteria for his distinction between the two terms can also be applied to the characterization of the recent development of a cognitive approach within the psychology of music. Following Kurth's arguments some theoretical assumptions in the first applications of the information processing approach to problems of music perception in the sixties and seventies have much in common with the assumptions of the »Tonpsychologie« . Only some recent theoretical developments may justify the use of the term cognitive psychology of music in a sense similar to Kurth's usage of the term »Musikpsychologie« .

67 subjects from different age-groups judged the comprehensibility of music critiques using the rating system designed by Langer, Schulz vom Thun and Tausch. The results show that not only music enthusiasts without musical education had great difficulties in understanding the critiques, but also professional musicians. Musicologists gave the highest ratings, other journalists than music critics gave the lowest ratings. Furtheron relations could be found between the comprehensibility ratings and personal attributes such as activity and independence in selecting performances and concerts .

This paper argues that implicit everyday knowledge concerning facts of music psychology - especially knowledge of cause - and - 'effect relations in music - decisively influences our actions and experiences as listeners of music by way of attribution processes. Apart from considerations as to why attribution theories have been neglected in music psychology, a simple action relating to music is paradigmatically analysed in terms of music psychology by means of Heckhausen's extended motivation model. Finally, further investigations of attribution-theoretical processes while listening to music are discussed.

Physiological reactions to music show a high inter-individual conformity, and there is a relationship between the structure of music and these reactions. This is shown by electrodermal activity-measurements of subjects hearing different pieces of music. 520 recordings of this kind were summarized as »mean-plots« by a computer. Rhythmic music in particular produces clear results. This is supported by earlier investigations and can be explained by the »neural control of sweating«.

In an experimental study with 96 students as subjects several aspects of the response to music were investigated as to their dependence on tempo. Three jazz titles, all differently arranged and especially created for this experiment, were played four times, each time in a different tempo. The rates of pulse and respiration, galvanic skin response and emotional appreciation varied systematically according to tempo. When the music was reduced to its rhythmical aspects, the tempo proved to lose its significance.