Perception and Understanding of Music

Please join us on Wednesday, May 24th for our final workshop meeting of the year.  Karen Chan (PhD Student in Music Theory and Cognition, Northwestern University) will be presenting some of her work on the cognitive mechanisms responsible for understanding musical counterpoint.  Her talk is entitled, “Musical Counterpoint:  Attention and perception.”  The abstract can be found below:

Human listeners have great difficulty paying attention to multiple concurrent sounds and yet are able to perceive multiple musical lines relatively easily. This dissertation proposal will discuss how musical structure and elements of an individual’s musical training affect where attention is directed when listening to Baroque imitative counterpoint. Historical sources and analytic studies dealing with contrapuntal structures are considered in order to propose the
beginnings of a theoretical model for how aural attention might be guided by musical structure.  Additionally, through perceptual and neural experiments we will explore 1) how composers might have manipulated musical features to make certain moments more “perceptually salient” and 2) how real-world listeners may perceive
counterpoint differently according to their specific musical background.

The talk will be from 4:30-6:00pm in Goodspeed 205 on Wednesday, May 24th.  As always, refreshments will be provided.  Thanks, and we hope to see you there!

This coming Wednesday (5/9) we will be welcoming Dr. Lori Holt (Professor, Department of Psychology and the Center for Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University) to the workshop.  Lori’s work on auditory cognition has profound impacts on both speech and music.  She will be giving a talk entitled, “Using speech to listen in on auditory processes.”  Her abstract can be found below:

A spoken syllable may persist in the world for a mere tenth of a second. Yet, as adult listeners, we are able to gather a great deal of information from these fleeting acoustic signals. The speech signal presents many cognitive and perceptual challenges to listeners and, as an ecologically-significant complex sound, it presents great opportunity for investigating higher-order auditory processing. Motivated by perceptual and cognitive challenges of spoken language recognition, I will describe the results of a series of studies that exploit artificial, nonlinguistic sounds that mimic some of the complexities of speech to gain experimental control over listeners’ histories of experience and, ultimately, to leverage this control to work toward mechanistic explanations of auditory learning. We have exploited classic supervised categorization training techniques commonly employed in visual cognition as well as a more naturalistic videogame training paradigm that models multimodal regularities of the world without requiring overt categorization or providing explicit feedback. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of relating general auditory learning to better understand speech processing and indicate the ways in which auditoryperception is jointly shaped by the acoustic signal, long-term learned representations, and regularities of the immediate environment. We argue that there are reciprocal advantages to studying speech from a general auditory perspective: studying this complex auditory signal provides insight into auditory processing and, likewise, constrains theories of speech perception. Long relegated as a special system that could tell us little about general human cognition, the study of speech perception as a flexible, experience-dependent perceptual skill has much to offer the development of a mature auditory cognitive neuroscience.

The workshop will be held on Wednesday, May 9th from 4:30-6:00pm in Cobb 116.  As always, refreshments will be provided.  Thanks, and hope to see you there!

On Friday, April 27th, we welcomed Dr. Erin Hannon (UNLV) to the workshop.  Erin spoke about domain-specific knowledge in both music and language, arguing that even the same stimulus — with identical acoustic properties — shows distinct neural and behavioral responses, based on the top-down knowledge of whether the stimulus is linguistic or musical in nature.  For example, Diana Deutsch’s music-as-speech illusion (in which a repeated spoken phrase takes on musical characteristics) speaks to the nature of domain-specific processing in speech and music, for as people transition from hearing the phrase as speech to music, they attend to the melodic and rhythmic information differently, and cannot simultaneously attend to the signal as both speech and music. (In fact, once one has heard the phrase as music, it is difficult to hear it as speech, even when it is embedded within the larger paragraph.)

Furthermore, double dissociation between music and language (in which individuals lose the ability to produce/comprehend language but not music and vice versa) speak to the domain-specificity of both music and language.  This is not to say, however, that experience in one domain has no bearing on the other domain.  Rather, research has demonstrated that music facilitates language comprehension (specifically through prosody and emotion recognition), and language facilitates music comprehension (e.g. tonal language speakers are better at pitch discrimination).

Erin then raised the important question when studying language and music differences in infants — which is: does the infant even understand the difference between the two?  Motherese, or highly exaggerated infant-directed prosodic speech, has many musical qualities, for instance.

In a series of experiments, Erin demonstrated that while there are similarities between language and music, in experimental settings participants are unable to do a cross-domain transfer between the two modalities.  For example, rhythmic variability in stress-timed and syllable-timed language has been shown in musical contexts.  Specifically, in syllable-timed languages, each syllable is perceived to take up roughly the same amount of time, and instrumental music composed by speakers of syllable-timed languages is on-the-whole less rhythmically variable.  However, while people can classify music based on these ratings, they are unable to transfer this information to language.

Erin also described a series of experiments that explored learning patterns which pitted musical content against linguistic content.  For example, participants would be trained to respond to stimuli presented in an “ABB” format, but not “ABA.”  However, pitch and phonemic information varied, creating fully incompatible trials (e.g. “la-ti-la” in speech and low-high-low in pitch), fully compatible trials (e.g. “la-ti-ti” in speech and high-low-low in pitch), as well as partially compatible trials, in which the linguistic content was compatible and the pitch content was incompatible and vice versa.  One might expect participants to be best at the fully compatible trials, worst at the fully incompatible trials, and roughly equal (and somewhere in-between) for the partially compatible trials.  Instead, Erin found that when the linguistic content was compatible, people rated the stimuli just as compatible as when both linguistic and pitch content was compatible, suggesting that linguistic information was valued over pitch information.

In follow up experiments, Erin demonstrated a similar hierarchy within music, in which participants value pitch information when it is pitted against timbre information.

We wondered whether speaking a tonal language or specific musical experiences might mitigate these effects, since these participants might attend to pitch information differently.

On Wednesday, April 18th, Serena Klos and Anders Hogstrom (University of Chicago) presented a theoretical framework for studying entrainment in musicians and non-musicians.  They began by trying to define rhythm, noting that many activities — such as walking or speaking — contain rhythmic properties, even if they are not traditionally thought of as rhythmic.  In music, however, we encounter many complex rhythms, sometimes unfolding simultaneously.  The question then becomes: how do we attend to such temporal events?  To adequately answer this question, Serena and Anders discussed some of the recent literature on how attention is rhythmic in nature.  Specifically, it has been shown that attentional modulation is linked with brainwave oscillations (as measured by EEG), and in particular, is coupled with alpha wave oscillations (which have a frequency at about 10Hz).

Anders and Serena noted that in many ways, musicians are rhythmic experts.  The question they asked was: are active musicians better (faster) at rhythmic entrainment tasks compared to non-active musicians and non-musicians?  Designing such a study would speak to the role of training and expertise on attentional entrainment, both at a behavioral and neurophysiological level.  In their pilot study, participants were presented with visual presentations of “Xs” and “Os.” Participants were instructed to press a button every time they saw an “O.”  Anders and Serena found that active musicians benefited from the stimuli being presented rhythmically, compared to the non-active musicians and non-musicians.  We then discussed the possibility of extending these findings to the auditory realm, as well as studying these group differences using EEG.

On Friday, April 27th at 1:30pm, we hope you can join us for a special session of the workshop.  Dr. Erin Hannon (Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Nevada – Las Vegas) will be giving a talk entitled: “Learning the language of music and the music of language: How music-specific knowledge develops.”  Her abstract can be found below:

Despite their surface similarities, music and language conform to distinct, domain-specific rules and regularities. Experienced listeners presumably possess music-specific expectations about which acoustic features will be most relevant in a musical context, but relatively little is known about how and when this knowledge emerges over the course of development. In this talk I will describe two sets of experiments comparing how infants, children, and adults respond to patterns in music and speech input. Given that music and speech share particular rhythmic properties, one set of experiments examines the extent to which listeners of different ages perceive these similarities across musical and linguistic stimuli. Given that melodic structure is of central importance in music but of secondary importance in language, a second set of experiments explores the extent to which listeners of different ages attend to or ignore melodic information in the context of language or music. Implications for the development of music-specific knowledge and capacities will be discussed.

The workshop will be meeting at a special time and place.  Rather than our usual Wednesday 4:30pm meeting in Goodspeed 205, we will be meeting on Friday at 1:30pm in Cobb 102.  As always, refreshments will be provided.  Thanks, and we hope to see you there!

On April 4^th, Patrick Fitzgibbon lead a discussion on the some of the differences that exist between expert and novice music listeners in how they make sense of music.  To do this, Patrick made use of a 2009 paper on speech perception by Alex Francis and Howard Nusbaum that examined how attention deployment differed between novice and expert synthetic speech listeners.  This study offered two possibilities – attention in experts may be better focused providing experts with more information or attention in experts may be more efficient in extracting meaning.  Patrick pointed out that data reported by Francis and Nusbaum showed support for the later case – suggesting that an expert’s attention is more efficient rather than just merely being more focused.  Patrick worked through an extremely profitable set of exercises in scale-degree recognition with the group to see if a similar difference exists between music listener experts and novices.   The discussion led to a preliminary outline for a training experiment to test how attention changes as individuals learn to recognize scale-degree in music.

On January 27^th, Jonathan De Souza discussed the role of the instrument in contraining and structuring a musician’s representational system for music.  Jonathan argues that this containment and structure can be seen in how performers move and gesture to music. He additionally argues that this containment and structure can also be seen conceptually in the composition process.  As an example, Jonathan uses Beethoven’s Pathetique – showing that the piece is conceptually bounded by the instrument for which it was composed.   To highlight the cognitive structuring effects that occur due to instrument use he cited the example of Beethoven’s need to improvise on instruments even after his hearing loss.  Jonathan argues that this occurs because instruments are not just tools for the production of music, but are used to structure and conceptually organize a musician’s musical experience.

On February 22^nd, Larry Zbikowski discussed the relationship between music and gesture.  To start he used an example of clip of Charlie Chaplin from the movie The Dictator to show that music adds something to the perceived actions.  He argued that this occurs due to an analogical mapping between actions and music that occurs not only because they share the same generic space but also because the actions and the music become conceptually blended.

For the first part of the talk Larry focused on the infrastructure of human communication that supports the relationship between gesture and music.  In the second part, Larry then used the relationship set up between gesture and music to examine what this analogic mapping can reveal about the infrastructure of music (or musical grammar). This is possible, Larry argues, because musical grammars exploit particular musical resources. For example – pitch specificity allows musicians to come back to the same “place”; while metrical structure allows for music to come back to the same “time.”  Larry argues that the coordination of gestures with the metrical structure benefits both the perceiver and producer – helping to direct their attention to perceptually rich information in the music.

To conclude, Larry suggested that studying music and their accompanying gestures (and the analogic mapping that exists between them) gives researchers an opportunity to better understand the dynamic processes that support human communication.

For our second meeting of the quarter, Serena Klos and Anders Hogstrom will be giving a talk entitled, “Training Entrainment: Differences in Attentional Modulation in Musicians” their abstract can be found below:

Researchers are increasingly interested in entrainment of attention and how it may modulate our interactions with the world. Listeners phase-lock or “entrain” to rhythm when the same rhythm is repeated over time. This entrainment to a rhythm then increases responsiveness or perception of a target that coincides with the rhythm. We will present a behavioral experiment that examines how expertise may modulate an individual’s ability to entrain to rhythm encountered in music. We will then discuss how these behavioral measures may be used to better understand attentional entrainment at a neurophysiological level.

The workshop will be held at 4:30pm on Wednesday, April 18th in Goodspeed 205.  Refreshments will be provided.  Thanks, and hope to see you there!

Hello Everyone,

I wanted to let you know that the Spring Quarter schedule has been finalized and is now listed under the “Schedule” tab.  Listed below are the remaining meetings for the quarter:

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April 18 . Serena Klos (PhD Student in Integrative Neuroscience, University of Chicago)

April 27 . Erin Hannon (Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Nevada – Las Vegas)*
NOTE: This workshop meets on Friday at 1:30pm in Cobb 102!

May 9 . Lori Holt (Professor of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University)

May 23 . Karen Chan (PhD Student in Music Theory and Cognition, Northwestern University)

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We hope to see you at the meetings!