Infant memory for musical experiences

Recent findings suggest that infants can remember words from stories over 2 week delays (Jusczyk, P. W., & Hohne, E. A. (1997). Infants' memory for spoken words. Science, 277, 1984-1986). Because music, like language, presents infants with a massively complex auditory learning task, it is possible that infant memory for musical stimuli is equally powerful. Seven-month-old infants heard two Mozart sonata movements daily for 2 weeks. Following a 2 week retention interval, the infants were tested on passages of the familiarized music, and passages taken from similar but novel music. Results from two experiments suggest that the infants retained the familiarized music in long-term memory, and that their listening preferences were affected by the extent to which familiar passages were removed from the musical contexts within which they were originally learned.     

The taste of music

Zarlino, one of the most important music theorists of the XVI century, described the minor consonances as 'sweet' (dolci) and 'soft' (soavi) (Zarlino 1558/1983, in On the Modes New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983). Hector Berlioz, in his Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration (London: Novello, 1855), speaks about the 'small acid-sweet voice' of the oboe. In line with this tradition of describing musical concepts in terms of taste words, recent empirical studies have found reliable associations between taste perception and low-level sound and musical parameters, like pitch and phonetic features. Here we investigated whether taste words elicited consistent musical representations by asking trained musicians to improvise on the basis of the four canonical taste words: sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. Our results showed that, even in free improvisation, taste words elicited very reliable and consistent musical patterns:'bitter' improvisations are low-pitched and legato (without interruption between notes), 'salty' improvisations are staccato (notes sharply detached from each other), 'sour' improvisations are high-pitched and dissonant, and 'sweet' improvisations are consonant, slow, and soft. Interestingly, projections of the improvisations of taste words to musical space (a vector space defined by relevant musical parameters) revealed that, in musical space, improvisations based on different taste words were nearly orthogonal or opposite. Decoding methods could classify binary choices of improvisations (i.e., identify the improvisation word from the melody) at performance of around 80%--well above chance. In a second experiment we investigated the mapping from perception of music to taste words. Fifty-seven non-musical experts listened to a fraction of the improvisations. We found that listeners classified with high performance the taste word which had elicited the improvisation. Our results, furthermore, show that associations of taste and music go beyond basic sensory attributes into the domain of semantics, and open a new venue of investigation to understand the origins of these consistent taste-musical patterns.     

Perceiving speech rhythm in music: Listeners classify instrumental songs according to language of origin

Recent evidence suggests that the musical rhythm of a particular culture may parallel the speech rhythm of that culture’s language (Patel, A. D., & Daniele, J. R. (2003). An empirical comparison of rhythm in language and music. Cognition, 87, B35-B45). The present experiments aimed to determine whether listeners actually perceive such rhythmic differences in a purely musical context (i.e., in instrumental music without words). In Experiment 1a, listeners successfully classified instrumental renditions of French and English songs having highly contrastive rhythmic differences. Experiment 1b replicated this result with the same songs containing rhythmic information only. In Experiments 2a and 2b, listeners successfully classified original and rhythm-only stimuli when language-specific rhythmic differences were less contrastive but more representative of differences found in actual music and speech. These findings indicate that listeners can use rhythmic similarities and differences to classify songs originally composed in two languages having contrasting rhythmic prosody.     

Learning harmony: the role of serial statistics

How do listeners learn about the statistical regularities underlying musical harmony? In traditional Western music, certain chords predict the occurrence of other chords: Given a particular chord, not all chords are equally likely to follow. In Experiments 1 and 2, we investigated whether adults make use of statistical information when learning new musical structures. Listeners were exposed to a novel musical system containing phrases generated using an artificial grammar. This new system contained statistical structure quite different from Western tonal music. Our results suggest that learners take advantage of the statistical patterning of chords to acquire new musical structures, similar to learning processes previously observed for language learning.     

音乐句法加工的认知机制与音乐结构的影响模式

音乐和语言是人类最重要的两种交流系统。与语言一样, 音符的排列和组织也是建立在一定的句法规则之上。尽管现有研究发现听众具有感知音乐句法的能力, 音乐句法加工的认知机制以及影响因素仍不清楚。基于此, 拟深入探究预期和整合在音乐音高句法加工中的作用, 以及音乐层级结构和时间结构对音高句法加工的影响。以期进一步揭示音乐句法加工的本质, 为音乐和语言的比较以及探索人类更一般的交流机制提供实证依据。     

Making psycholinguistics musical: Self-paced reading time evidence for shared processing of linguistic and musical syntax

Linguistic processing, especially syntactic processing, is often considered a hallmark of human cognition; thus, the domain specificity or domain generality of syntactic processing has attracted considerable debate. The present experiments address this issue by simultaneously manipulating syntactic processing demands in language and music. Participants performed self-paced reading of garden path sentences, in which structurally unexpected words cause temporary syntactic processing difficulty. A musical chord accompanied each sentence segment, with the resulting sequence forming a coherent chord progression. When structurally unexpected words were paired with harmonically unexpected chords, participants showed substantially enhanced garden path effects. No such interaction was observed when the critical words violated semantic expectancy or when the critical chords violated timbral expectancy. These results support a prediction of the shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis (Patel, 2003), which suggests that music and language draw on a common pool of limited processing resources for integrating incoming elements into syntactic structures. Notations of the stimuli from this study may be downloaded from pbr.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Singing in the Brain: Independence of Lyrics and Tunes

Why is vocal music the oldest and still the most popular form of music? Very possibly because vocal music involves an intimate combination of speech and music, two of the most specific, high-level skills of human beings. The issue we address is whether people listening to a song treat the linguistic and musical components separately or integrate them within a single percept. Event-related potentials were recorded while musicians listened to excerpts from operas sung a capella. Excerpts were ended by semantically congruous or incongruous words sung either in or out of key. Results clearly demonstrated the independence of lyrics and tunes, so that an additive model of semantic- and harmonic-violations processing predicted the data extremely well. These results are consistent with a modular organization of the human cognitive system and open new perspectives in the search for the similarities and differences between language and music processing.     

失歌症者对音乐和言语音高的加工

音高是音乐和言语领域中一个重要维度。失歌症是一种对音乐音高加工的障碍。探讨失歌症者对音乐和言语音高的加工有助于揭示音乐和言语音高加工是否共享特定的认知和神经机制。已有研究结果表明, 失歌症者对音乐音高加工存在障碍, 这种音高障碍在一定程度上影响到言语音高加工。同时, 声调语言背景无法弥补失歌症者的音高障碍。这些研究结果支持了资源－共享框架(resource-sharing framework), 即音乐和语言共享特定的认知和神经机制(Patel, 2003, 2008, in press), 并可能在一定程度上为失语症临床治疗提供借鉴。     

Schönberg’s Judaism from Notes to Thought and from Thought to Notes

What concept of Judaism is present in Schönberg’s philosophy of music? It is impossible to separate the musical texture from his experience of reconciliation with Judaism, and his new idea of musical drama is a confirmation that the dodecaphonic structure of musical thinking connects with Schönberg’s idea of the Jewish ethical and religious point of view. A comparative analysis of some essays with some operas shows the internal tie between music and Judaism in dodecaphony.     

On the Common Origin of Music and Philosophy: Plato,Nietzsche, and Benjamin

The essay shows the common ground between music and philosophy from the origin of Western philosophy to the crisis of metaphysical thinking, in particular with Nietzsche and Benjamin. At the beginning, the relationship between philosophy and music is marked by the hegemony of the word on the sound. This is the nature of the Platonic idea of music. With Nietzsche and Benjamin this hegemony is denied and a new vision of the relationship becomes possible. The sound is the origin both of language and of music. In thinking about this origin, philosophy shows that “thinking about music” is “thinking in music”, and that this thinking is the origin of philosophy itself.     

The role of the cerebral hemispheres in music.

This review examines the cerebral control of musical behaviors. In clinical populations, impairment of related musical and linguistic functions, such as reading, writing, articulation, time sense, and prosody, implies the likely role of the language hemisphere in music. Similarly, for both clinical and normal populations, an investigation of mental abilities common to music and language points to left hemisphere control for certain aspects of temporal order, duration, simultaneity, rhythm, effector motor control, and categorical perception. While clinical studies have revealed deficits in various kinds of music capabilities with both left and right cerebral lesions, normal subjects similarly demonstrate varying degrees of asymmetry for components of music emphasizing pitch, harmony, timbre, intensity, and rhythm. Since differential laterality effects are apparent as a function of subjects' training or adopted strategies, the way musical information is processed may be an important determinant of hemispheric mediation. One hemisphere should not be regarded as “dominant” for music, but rather each interacts with the other, operating according to its own specialization.     

Structural integration in language and music: Evidence for a shared system

In this study, we investigate whether language and music share cognitive resources for structural processing. We report an experiment that used sung materials and manipulated linguistic complexity (subject-extracted relative clauses, object-extracted relative clauses) and musical complexity (in-key critical note, out-of-key critical note, auditory anomaly on the critical note involving a loudness increase). The auditory-anomaly manipulation was included in order to test whether the difference between in-key and out-of-key conditions might be due to any salient, unexpected acoustic event. The critical dependent measure involved comprehension accuracies to questions about the propositional content of the sentences asked at the end of each trial. The results revealed an interaction between linguistic and musical complexity such that the difference between the subject- and object-extracted relative clause conditions was larger in the out-of-key condition than in the in-key and auditory-anomaly conditions. These results provide evidence for an overlap in structural processing between language and music.     

Songs as an aid for language acquisition

In previous research, Saffran and colleagues [Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274, 1926-1928; Saffran, J. R., Newport, E. L., & Aslin, R. N. (1996). Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 606-621.] have shown that adults and infants can use the statistical properties of syllable sequences to extract words from continuous speech. They also showed that a similar learning mechanism operates with musical stimuli [Saffran, J. R., Johnson, R. E. K., Aslin, N., & Newport, E. L. (1999). Abstract Statistical learning of tone sequences by human infants and adults. Cognition, 70, 27-52.]. In this work we combined linguistic and musical information and we compared language learning based on speech sequences to language learning based on sung sequences. We hypothesized that, compared to speech sequences, a consistent mapping of linguistic and musical information would enhance learning. Results confirmed the hypothesis showing a strong learning facilitation of song compared to speech. Most importantly, the present results show that learning a new language, especially in the first learning phase wherein one needs to segment new words, may largely benefit of the motivational and structuring properties of music in song.     

Hollow Sounds: Toward a Zen‐Derived Aesthetics of Contemporary Music

To attempt to fill a perceived gap in Japanese aesthetics concerning music, this article sketches a possible way into conceptualizing a Zen‐ or Kyoto‐school‐derived aesthetics of contemporary music. Drawing principally on Kyoto‐School philosopher Ueda Shizuteru's theories of language's three levels (signal, symbolic, and hollow words), the author proposes a similar distinction between different kinds of musical experience. Analogous with Ueda's analysis of poetry, the oscillation of signal or symbolic sound and hollow ones is found to be what gives certain contemporary music its spiritual power. By applying this poetic–religious theory of language to music, an entirely new way of understanding contemporary music becomes apparent. As test case of this new approach, Morton Feldman's 1970 work The Viola in My Life (2) is analyzed. The final section addresses the differences between this method of understanding via nothingness and traditional Idealist approaches via the Absolute.     

音乐知觉期待的研究述评

音乐知觉期待是音乐时间知觉过程中重要的心理现象,它直接影响音乐作为时间艺术的本质特性。文章主要探讨了和音乐知觉期待相关的以下几方面问题：音乐知觉期待存在的范畴,音乐知觉期待依靠音乐元素的四种期待率,音乐知觉期待存在的两种类别和采用的五种研究范式,音乐知觉期待研究的主要领域（神经生理机制、记忆和启动效应等方面）,以及音乐知觉期待通过音乐时间知觉和时间估计对音乐时间操作的影响。展望该领域今后研究的方向,可以认为,对音乐知觉期待的心理特征和存在条件在音乐时间操作中作用的进一步研究,将在很大程度上揭示音乐时间操作中的普遍现象——计时偏差的真正原因     

What is specific to music processing? Insights from congenital amusia

Musical abilities are generally regarded as an evolutionary by-product of more important functions, such as those involved in language. However, there is increasing evidence that humans are born with musical predispositions that develop spontaneously into sophisticated knowledge bases and procedures that are unique to music. Recent findings also suggest that the brain is equipped with music-specific neural networks and that these can be selectively compromised by a congenital anomaly. This results in a disorder, congenital amusia, that appears to be limited to the processing of music. Recent evidence points to fine-grained perception of pitch as the root of musical handicap. Hence, musical abilities appear to depend crucially on the fine-tuning of pitch, in much the same way that language abilities rely on fine time resolution.     

Music, evolution and language

Darwin (1871) noted that the human musical faculty 'must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed'. Indeed, previous research with human infants and young children has revealed that we are born with variable musical capabilities. Here, the adaptive purpose served by these differing capabilities is discussed with reference to comparative findings regarding the acoustic behavior of nonhuman primates. The findings provide evidence supporting Darwin's hypothesis of an intermediate stage of human evolutionary history characterized by a communication system that resembles music more closely than language and possibly acting as a precursor for both current language and music.     

Music in dreams

Music in dreams is rarely reported in scientific literature, while the presence of musical themes in dreams of famous musicians is anecdotally reported. We did a systematic investigation to evaluate whether the occurrence of musical dreams could be related to musical competence and practice, and to explore specific features of dreamt pieces. Thirty-five professional musicians and thirty non-musicians filled out a questionnaire about the characteristics of their musical activity and a structured dream log on the awakening for 30 consecutive days. Musicians dream of music more than twice with respect to non-musicians; musical dreams frequency is related to the age of commencement of musical instruction, but not to the daily load of musical activity. Nearly half of the recalled music was non-standard, suggesting that original music can be created in dreams.     

The influence of alexithymia and music on the incidental memory for emotion words

Alexithymia is a multifaceted personality construct which encompasses difficulties in identifying and expressing feelings along with an externally oriented cognitive style. We investigated whether congruent vs. incongruent emotional musical priming (happy and angry music) during encoding would moderate the effects of alexithymia on recognition rates. We found that high alexithymia scorers recognized fewer joy and anger words than low scorers. Angry music decreased recognition rates in high alexithymia scorers compared to low alexithymia scorers. The congruency and incongruency effects between music and words depended on alexithymia level. The anger deficit in high alexithymia scorers and the possible support provided by happiness cues are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The nature of music from a biological perspective

Music, as language, is a universal human trait. Throughout human history and across all cultures, people have produced and enjoyed music. Despite its ubiquity, the musical capacity is rarely studied as a biological function. Music is typically viewed as a cultural invention. In this paper, the evidence bearing on the biological perspective of the musical capacity is reviewed. Related issues, such as domain-specificity, innateness, and brain localization, are addressed in an attempt to offer a unified conceptual basis for the study of music processing. This scheme should facilitate the study of the biological foundations of music by bringing together the fields of genetics, developmental and comparative research, neurosciences, and musicology.