0000000000069070
AUTHOR
Bénédicte Poulin-charronnat
Influence of expressive versus mechanical musical performance on short-term memory for musical excerpts
Recognition memory for details of musical phrases (discrimination between targets and similar lures) improves for up to 15 s following the presentation of a target, during continuous listening to the ongoing piece. This is attributable to binding of stimulus features during that time interval. The ongoing-listening paradigm is an ecologically valid approach for investigating short-term memory, but previous studies made use of relatively mechanical MIDI-produced stimuli. The present study assessed whether expressive performances would modulate the previously reported finding. Given that expressive performances introduced slight differences between initially presented targets and their target…
A module for syntactic processing in music?
Music and language have rules governing the structural organization of events. By analogy to language, these rules are referred to as the ‘syntactic rules’ of music. Does this analogy imply that the brain actually performs syntactic computations on musical structures, similar to those for language and based on a specialized module [1–3]? In contrast to linguistic syntax, which involves abstract computation between words, rules governing musical syntax are rooted in psychoacoustic properties of sound: syntactically related events are related on a sensory level and involve only weak acoustical deviance.
Modifying auditory perception with prisms? Aftereffects of prism adaptation on a wide auditory spectrum in musicians and nonmusicians
Prism adaptation consists of pointing to visual targets while wearing prisms that shift the visual field laterally. The aftereffects are not restricted to sensorimotor level but extend to spatial cognition. There is a link between spatial representation and auditory frequency, with an association of low frequencies on the left side and high frequencies on the right side of space. The present study aimed first at evaluating the representation of auditory frequencies on a wide range of frequencies in musicians and nonmusicians. We used the ‘auditory interval bisection judgment’ within three auditory intervals. The results showed a pseudoneglect behavior in pretest in musicians and nonmusician…
Musical structure modulates semantic priming in vocal music.
It has been shown that harmonic structure may influence the processing of phonemes whatever the extent of participants' musical expertise [Bigand, E., Tillmann, B., Poulin, B., D'Adamo, D. A.,Madurell, F. (2001). The effect of harmonic context on phoneme monitoring in vocal music. Cognition, 81, B11-B20]. The present study goes a step further by investigating how musical harmony may potentially interfere with the processing of words in vocal music. Eight-chord sung sentences were presented, their last word being either semantically related (La girafe a un tres grand cou, The giraffe has a very long neck) or unrelated to the previous linguistic context (La girafe a un tres grand pied, The gi…
Les interactions entre les traitements de la musique et du langage
International audience; Alors même que la musique et le langage sont deux systèmes qui présentent de prime abord des différences évidentes, ils possèdent, au-delà de ces différences, des similitudes importantes. La musique comme le langage, est un système complexe spécifique à l’être humain, dans lequel des éléments discrets organisés temporellement conduisent à l’émergence de régularités qui peuvent être apprises implicitement par le système cognitif. Ces similitudes ont conduit la recherche en cognition musicale à s’intéresser aux relations entre les traitements de lamusique et du langage, et à étudier si ces deux systèmes partageaient des processus cognitifs et neuronaux communs.
Effet de l'imagerie motrice prolongée sur la preception de l'effort et ses corrélats neuronaux
National audience
Effet de l’imagerie motrice prolongée sur la perception de l’effort et ses corrélats neuronaux
International audience
Studying Musical Savants: A Commentary on Grundy and Ockelford (2014)
On the basis of the ‘zygonic’ theory (Ockelford, 2006), Grundy and Ockelford (2014) investigate musical expectations evoked during the course of hearing a piece for the first time in a prodigious musical savant (Derek Paravicini). Overall, the results provided by Derek support the principles of the zygonic theory, especially that the higher the implication factor of a note, the more likely Derek would predict its occurrence. My commentary first raises the question of the use of such special individuals as musical savants to generalize findings to the general population, and second I will address the issue of the task and the stimuli used.
Electrophysiological Effects of Direct Electrical Stimulations During Awake Brain Surgery: Methodological Considerations
International audience; IRECT electrical stimulation (DES) has long been used to perform real-time functional mapping of the brain. More recently, this technique was introduced in the neurosurgery of slow-growing and infiltrative brain tumors to guide the resection with great success. By generating transient perturbations, this method allows the real-time identification of both cortical areas and subcortical networks that are essential for the function. Thus, as much as possible, non-functional tissue can be removed while minimizing the sequelae. However, the understanding of the electrophysiological effects of DES and, in particular its remote propagation, remains an open and key question.…
Cross-modal aftereffects of visuo-manual prism adaptation: Transfer to auditory divided attention in healthy subjects.
OBJECTIVE Prism adaptation was shown to modify auditory perception. Using a dichotic listening task, which assesses auditory divided attention, benefits of a rightward prism adaptation were demonstrated in neglect patients (i.e., a syndrome following right hemisphere brain damage) by reducing their left auditory extinction. It is currently unknown whether prism adaptation affects auditory divided attention in healthy subjects. In the present study, we investigated the aftereffects of prism adaptation on dichotic listening. METHOD A sample of 47 young adults performed a dichotic listening task, in which pairs of words were presented with two words sounded simultaneously, one in each ear. Thr…
The role of expectation in music: from the score to emotions and the brain
Like discourse, music is a dynamic process that occurs over time. Listeners usually expect some events or structures of events to occur in the prolongation of a given context. Part of the musical emotional experience would depend upon how composers (improvisers) fulfill these expectancies. Musical expectations are a core phenomenon of music cognition, and the present article provides an overview of its foundation in the score as well as in listeners' behavior and brain, and how it can be simulated by artificial neural networks. We highlight parallels to language processing and include the attentional and emotional dimensions of musical expectations. Studying musical expectations is thus val…
Empirical evidence for musical syntax processing? Computer simulations reveal the contribution of auditory short-term memory
During the last decade, it has been argued that (1) music processing involves syntactic representations similar to those observed in language, and (2) that music and language share similar syntactic-like processes and neural resources. This claim is important for understanding the origin of music and language abilities and, furthermore, it has clinical implications. The Western musical system, however, is rooted in psychoacoustic properties of sound, and this is not the case for linguistic syntax. Accordingly, musical syntax processing could be parsimoniously understood as an emergent property of auditory memory rather than a property of abstract processing similar to linguistic processing.…
Processing of Musical Syntax Tonic versus Subdominant: An Event-related Potential Study
Abstract The present study investigates the effect of a change in syntactic-like musical function on event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Eight-chord piano sequences were presented to musically expert and novice listeners. Instructed to watch a movie and to ignore the musical sequences, the participants had to react when a chord was played with a different instrument than the piano. Participants were not informed that the relevant manipulation was the musical function of the last chord (target) of the sequences. The target chord acted either as a syntactically stable tonic chord (i.e., a C major chord in the key of C major) or as a less syntactically stable subdominant chord (i.e., a C ma…
New evidence for chunk-based models in word segmentation.
International audience; : There is large evidence that infants are able to exploit statistical cues to discover the words of their language. However, how they proceed to do so is the object of enduring debates. The prevalent position is that words are extracted from the prior computation of statistics, in particular the transitional probabilities between syllables. As an alternative, chunk-based models posit that the sensitivity to statistics results from other processes, whereby many potential chunks are considered as candidate words, then selected as a function of their relevance. These two classes of models have proven to be difficult to dissociate. We propose here a procedure, which lea…
Children's implicit knowledge of harmony in Western music.
Three experiments examined children's knowledge of harmony in Western music. The children heard a series of chords followed by a final, target chord. In Experiment 1, French 6- and 11-year-olds judged whether the target was sung with the vowel /i/ or /u/. In Experiment 2, Australian 8- and 11-year-olds judged whether the target was played on a piano or a trumpet. In Experiment 3, Canadian 8- and 11-year-olds judged whether the target sounded good (i.e. consonant) or bad (dissonant). The target was either the most stable chord in the established musical key (i.e. the tonic, based on do, the first note of the scale) or a less stable chord. Performance was faster (Experiments 1, 2 and 3) and m…
The learnability of language. Insights from the implicit learning literature
International audience; The issue of the learnability of language contrasts the proposals of Chomsky (e.g. 1965), who claimed that the major part of language mastery involves innate domain-specific structures, to more recent nonnativist approaches, from the usage-based theories to Bayesian models, which contend that language acquisition rests on all-purpose domain-general learning processes. This chapter aims at examining the potential contribution to this issue of the literature on implicit learning, defined as the set of studies addresing the question of how participants learn in incidental conditions when they are faced with complex situations governed by arbitrary rules in laboratory se…
Case report: Remote neuromodulation with direct electrical stimulation of the brain, as evidenced by intra-operative EEG recordings during wide-awake neurosurgery
Letter to the editor; International audience
The influence of task-irrelevant music on language processing: syntactic and semantic structures.
Recent research has suggested that music and language processing share neural resources, leading to new hypotheses about interference in the simultaneous processing of these two structures. The present study investigated the effect of a musical chord's tonal function on syntactic processing (Experiment 1) and semantic processing (Experiment 2) using a cross-modal paradigm and controlling for acoustic differences. Participants read sentences and performed a lexical decision task on the last word, which was, syntactically or semantically, expected or unexpected. The simultaneously presented (task-irrelevant) musical sequences ended on either an expected tonic or a less-expected subdominant ch…
Prolonged motor imagery increases motor-related cortical potential amplitude and perception of effort during imagined and actual isometric knee extensions
Thème du colloque : «Sport Science in a Metropolitan Area»; International audience
"Awake Surgery" of Slow-Growing Tumors and Cortical Excitability Measured by EEG Recordings. Preliminary Results
International audience; To investigate interhemispheric imbalance following "awake surgeries" of slow-growing tumors we recorded EEG in a visuo-manual RT paradigm. Increase of cortical excitability within the ipsilesional hemisphere was signed by increased ERPs amplitude for two patients. The cortical excitability in the lesioned hemisphere may be increased to maintain performances and cerebral plasticity.
Mémoire et apprentissage
International audience
Tonal cognition
International audience; The present chapter deals with tonal cognition, and more precisely with tonal hierarchies and how tonal hierarchies influence music perception in Western music. The 12 chromatic tones, on which Western tonal music is based, are organized in subsets of seven tones that define musical keys. Within a given key, some tones and chords are structurally more important than others, resulting in intra-key hierarchies. Inter-key distances also rely on tonal hierarchies. Keys are not only related because they share several tones, but also because hierarchically important tones in one key continue to be of importance in others. Two major models of tonal hierarchies are detailed:…
Repetition priming: Is music special?
Using short and long contexts, the present study investigated musical priming effects that are based on chord repetition and harmonic relatedness. A musical target (a chord) was preceded by either an identical prime or a different but harmonically related prime. In contrast to words, pictures, and environmental sounds, chord processing was not facilitated by repetition. Experiments 1 and 2 using single-chord primes showed either no significant difference between chord repetition and harmonic relatedness or facilitated processing for harmonically related targets. Experiment 3 using longer prime contexts showed that musical priming depended more on the musical function of the target in the p…
Are we "experienced listeners"? A review of the musical capacities that do not depend on formal musical training.
The present paper reviews a set of studies designed to investigate different aspects of the capacity for processing Western music. This includes perceiving the relationships between a theme and its variations, perceiving musical tensions and relaxations, generating musical expectancies, integrating local structures in large-scale structures, learning new compositional systems and responding to music in an emotional (affective) way. The main focus of these studies was to evaluate the influence of intensive musical training on these capacities. The overall set of data highlights that some musical capacities are acquired through exposure to music without the help of explicit training. These ca…