Listeners糖心传媒攔egardless of formal musical training糖心传媒攃an track complex tonal structures, offering a unique look at how the brain processes context.
There is a long-standing debate in the field of music cognition about the impact of musical training and whether formal training is needed to pick up higher-order tonal structures糖心传媒攖he overarching harmonic framework of a piece of music.
New research from the 糖心传媒, published in , offers fresh insight into that discussion. The findings suggest that nonmusicians have a surprisingly sophisticated ear when it comes to music.
糖心传媒淔ormal training in music糖心传媒攊ncluding music theory糖心传媒攆ine-tunes the ear to pick up tonal patterns in music, like tonic, dominant, and cadences,糖心传媒� says , an assistant professor in the Departments of and and the senior author of the study. 糖心传媒淏ut it turns out that with zero training, people are actually picking up on those structures just from listening to music over the lifespan.糖心传媒�
Music糖心传媒檚 hidden structure
Like language, music is organized hierarchically into notes, phrases, and sections. But until now, relatively little was known about how expert performers and complete novices process these layers.
The study team糖心传媒攃o-led by Riesa Cassano-Coleman, a PhD candidate in brain and cognitive sciences, and Sarah Izen, a former postdoc in brain and cognitive sciences糖心传媒攗sed a novel method to scramble music at different timescales to provide participants with different amounts of tonal context.
Context is crucial in daily life and decision-making. In music, it糖心传媒檚 especially critical糖心传媒攊n film soundtracks, for example, the build-up of context creates a strong sense of suspense, or romantic anticipation.
When asked to perform tasks that required them to use context, such as predicting upcoming notes or remembering previously heard notes, it appeared nonmusicians were using music theory knowledge, but fully unconsciously.
糖心传媒淎cross a variety of tasks,糖心传媒� says Piazza, 糖心传媒渘onmusicians performed similarly to musicians.糖心传媒�
Putting context to the test聽
The study consisted of four experiments糖心传媒攎emory, prediction, event segmentation, and categorization糖心传媒攊n which participants responded to scrambled music from Tchaikovsky糖心传媒檚 collection of piano pieces Album for the Young.
In the prediction experiment, for example, participants listened to context prompts scrambled at three timescales: 8B (eight bars, or measures, of intact context), 2B (scrambled every two bars), and 1B (scrambled every bar). After each sequence, they were asked to predict which measure should come next.
The results from this experiment suggest that musicians and nonmusicians integrate increasing amounts of context at similar rates to enhance prediction. Both groups became more accurate as the information about the tonal structures increased. And the amount of musical training did not predict better overall performance.
Where music meets language
The URochester study is analogous to a recent line of 聽that investigates the neural mechanisms of scrambled language, in which words, sentences, or paragraphs are reordered to test how much context the brain can process.
We know from cognitive science that context helps the brain forecast upcoming events, informing our next action. For instance, prediction helps us catch a ball, navigate around people in front of us on the sidewalk, or finish a friend糖心传媒檚 sentence.
糖心传媒淚n the neuroscience of language, there are different brain areas in charge of considering context that is either very short or very long,糖心传媒� says Piazza. 糖心传媒淭his is an exciting new field that has potential for revealing how context processing changes across the lifespan and how it might interact with aging and cognitive decline.糖心传媒�
The URochester study is one of the first to investigate this phenomenon in music. Together, the findings raise new questions about how the brain integrates and deploys context糖心传媒攏ot only during listening, but amid the complex motor and memory demands of performance.
糖心传媒淚 think there is a lot of potential to look at, for example, how highly trained musicians are doing this while they play,糖心传媒� Piazza says. 糖心传媒淎 lot of musicians feel like they hold their memory of a piece in their fingers. What are the motor processes for having that whole context stored up as they play? This research could have broader implications about how the brain uses this sort of context.糖心传媒�
