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…

Discrimination of tonal and atonal music in congenital amusia: The advantage of implicit tasks

International audience; Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder of music perception and production, which has been attributed to a major deficit in pitch processing. While most studies and diagnosis tests have used explicit investigation methods, recent studies using implicit investigation approaches have revealed some unimpaired pitch structure processing in congenital amusia. The present study investigated amusic individuals' processing of tonal structures (e.g., musical structures respecting the Western tonal system) via three different questions. Amusic participants and their matched controls judged tonal versions (original musical excerpts) and atonal versions (with manipula…

The feeling of familiarity for music in patients with a unilateral temporal lobe lesion: A gating study

International audience; Previous research has indicated that the medial temporal lobe (MTL), and more specifically the perirhinal cortex, plays a role in the feeling of familiarity for non-musical stimuli. Here, we examined contribution of the MTL to the feeling of familiarity for music by testing patients with unilateral MTL lesions. We used a gating paradigm: segments of familiar and unfamiliar musical excerpts were played with increasing durations (250, 500, 1000, 2000, 4000 ms and complete excerpts), and participants provided familiarity judgments for each segment. Based on the hypothesis that patients might need longer segments than healthy controls (HC) to identify excerpts as familia…

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.

Learning music: prospects about implicit knowledge in music, new technologies and music education

International audience; The chapter proposes an overview of musical learning by underlining the force of the cognitive system, which is able to learn and to treat complex information at an implicit level. The first part summarises recent research in cognitive sciences, that studies the processes of implicit learning in music perception. These studies show that the abilities of non-musicians in perceiving music are very often comparable to those of musicians. The second part illustrates by means of some examples the use of multimedia tools for learning tonal and atonal music; these tools take advantage of the interaction between visual and auditive modalities.

Local versus global processing of harmonic cadences in the solution of musical puzzles

The structure of Western musical pieces is delineated by several kinds of cadence. Half cadences in the main key indicate temporary endings; authentic cadences in the main key indicate definitive endings. Authentic cadences in the dominant key are of cognitive interest, since they mark a definitive ending at a local level but a temporary ending at a global level. This study investigated the local versus global processing of these cadences. Participants were presented with sections of 16-bar minuets displayed on a computer screen in the form of a musical jigsaw puzzle. The sections consisted of either the first or the second half of the minuet (8 bars each). The first section ended with eith…

Influence of Regular Rhythmic Versus Textural Sound Sequences on Semantic and Conceptual Processing

Conceptual priming studies have shown that listening to musical primes triggers semantic activation. The present study further investigated with a free semantic evocation task, 1) how rhythmic vs. textural structures affect the amount of words evoked after a musical sequence, and 2) whether both features also affect the content of the semantic activation. Rhythmic sequences were composed of various percussion sounds with a strong underlying beat and metrical structure. Textural sound sequences consisted of blended timbres and sound sources evolving over time without identifiable pulse. Participants were asked to verbalize the concepts evoked by the musical sequences. We measured the number …

Music and the Aging Brain

In a society that is getting considerably older, it becomes important to identify potential mechanisms promoting successful aging to prevent, limit, and rehabilitate cognitive and emotional impairments typical of normal or pathological aging. Music is a powerful stimulus able to modulate widespread brain activations. Recent research has increasingly considered music as a promising, stimulating training and rehabilitation tool for improving cognition and promoting well-being and social connection. This chapter provides an overview of recent research investigating music and aging. It first focuses on the effects of music in normal aging, both in terms of musical expertise and simple musical e…

Rhythmic priming of grammaticality judgments in children: Duration matters

Abstract Research has shown that regular rhythmic primes improve grammaticality judgments of subsequently presented sentences compared with irregular rhythmic primes. In the theoretical framework of dynamic attending, regular rhythmic primes are suggested to act as driving rhythms to entrain neural oscillations. These entrained oscillations then sustain once the prime has finished, engendering a state of global enhanced activation that facilitates the processing of subsequent sentences. Up to now, this global rhythmic priming effect has largely been shown with primes that are approximately 30 s or more. To investigate whether shorter primes also facilitate grammaticality judgments, two expe…

Boosting syntax training with temporally regular musical primes in children with cochlear implants

International audience; Objectives : Previous research has suggested the use of rhythmic structures (implemented in musical material) to improve linguistic structure processing (i.e., syntax processing), in particular for populations showing deficits in syntax and temporal processing (e.g., children with developmental language disorders). The present study proposes a long-term training program to improve syntax processing in children with cochlear implants, a population showing syntax processing deficits in perception and production.Methods : The training program consisted of morphosyntactic training exercises (based on speech processing) that were primed by musical regular primes (8 sessio…

The effect of harmonic context on phoneme monitoring in vocal music

The processing of a target chord depends on the previous musical context in which it has appeared. This harmonic priming effect occurs for fine syntactic-like changes in context and is observed irrespective of the extent of participants' musical expertise (Bigand & Pineau, Perception and Psychophysics, 59 (1997) 1098). The present study investigates how the harmonic context influences the processing of phonemes in vocal music. Eight-chord sequences were presented to participants. The four notes of each chord were played with synthetic phonemes and participants were required to quickly decide whether the last chord (the target) was sung on a syllable containing the phoneme /i/ or /u/. The mu…

Categorization of Extremely Brief Auditory Stimuli: Domain-Specific or Domain-General Processes?

The present study investigated the minimum amount of auditory stimulation that allows differentiation of spoken voices, instrumental music, and environmental sounds. Three new findings were reported. 1) All stimuli were categorized above chance level with 50 ms-segments. 2) When a peak-level normalization was applied, music and voices started to be accurately categorized with 20 ms-segments. When the root-mean-square (RMS) energy of the stimuli was equalized, voice stimuli were better recognized than music and environmental sounds. 3) Further psychoacoustical analyses suggest that the categorization of extremely brief auditory stimuli depends on the variability of their spectral envelope in…

The Relative Importance of Local and Global Structures in Music Perception

Research in experimental psychology has emotion in music is developed by L. B. Meyer.2 shown two paradoxes in music perception. By According to Meyer, listeners are not passive, mere exposure to musical pieces, Western lis- but rather constantly develop perceptual expectteners acquire sensitivity to the regularities ancies about the possible evolution of the underlying tonal music. This implicitly acquired music. Emotions arise from the way the comknowledge allows listeners to perceive subtle poser (or the improvising performer) fulfills relations between musical events and permits or frustrates these expectancies. To some musically untrained listeners to behave as music- extent, music perc…

Further Investigation of Harmonic Priming in Long Contexts Using Musical Timbre as Surface Marker to Control for Temporal Effects

Harmonic priming studies have reported facilitated processing for chords that are harmonically related to the prime context. Responses to the target (the last chord of an 8-chord sequence) were faster and more accurate when the target was strongly related, i.e., a tonic chord, to the preceding prime context than when it was less related, i.e., a subdominant chord. Results have been interpreted in terms of musical expectations and processing speed: the prime allows listeners to develop expectations for future events which lead to facilitated processing of the most strongly expected event. The present experiment investigated an alternative hypothesis suggesting that the harmonic structure of…

Cerebellar patients demonstrate preserved implicit knowledge of association strengths in musical sequences

Recent findings suggest the involvement of the cerebellum in perceptual and cognitive tasks. Our study investigated whether cerebellar patients show musical priming based on implicit knowledge of tonal-harmonic music. Participants performed speeded phoneme identification on sung target chords, which were either related or less-related to prime contexts in terms of the tonal-harmonic system. As groups, both cerebellar patients and age-matched controls showed facilitated processing for related targets, as previously observed for healthy young adults. The outcome suggests that an intact cerebellum is not mandatory for accessing implicit knowledge stored in long-term memory and for its influenc…

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…

Does Formal Musical Structure Affect Perception of Musical Expressiveness?

The aim of the study was to assess the effect of systematic modifications in global musical structures on perceived expressiveness. Recorded performances of piano pieces of Bach, Mozart and Schonberg were segmented into short chunks of six seconds in average. These chunks were linked either in a forward order (Original version) or in a backward order (Inverted version). In the inverted version, the formal global structure of the pieces was destroyed, but the superficial features and the local structures inside the chunks were unaltered. Forty non-musician subjects were required to rate the musical expressiveness of these pieces on 29 semantic scales. Half listened to the three original ver…

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.…

Musical familiarity in congenital amusia: Evidence from a gating paradigm

Congenital amusia has been described as a lifelong deficit of music perception and production, notably including amusic individuals' difficulties to recognize a familiar tune without the aid of lyrics. The present study aimed to evaluate whether amusic individuals might have acquired long-term knowledge of familiar music, and to test for the minimal amount of acoustic information necessary to access this knowledge (if any) in amusia. Segments of familiar and unfamiliar instrumental musical pieces were presented with increasing duration (250, 500, 1000 msec etc.), and participants provided familiarity judgments for each segment. Results showed that amusic individuals succeeded in differentia…

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…

Harmonic priming in an amusic patient: the power of implicit tasks.

Our study investigated with an implicit method (i.e., priming paradigm) whether I.R. - a brain-damaged patient exhibiting severe amusia - processes implicitly musical structures. The task consisted in identifying one of two phonemes (Experiment 1) or timbres (Experiment 2) on the last chord of eight-chord sequences (i.e., target). The targets were harmonically related or less related to the prior chords. I.R. displayed harmonic priming effects: Phoneme and timbre identification was faster for related than for less related targets (Experiments 1 and 2). However, I.R.'s explicit judgements of completion for the same sequences did not differ between related and less related contexts (Experimen…

Effects of Global and Local Contexts on Harmonic Expectancy

Several psycholinguistic studies have investigated the influence of local and global semantic contexts on word processing. The first aim of the present study was to examine local and global level contributions to harmonic priming. The second was to test a spreading-activation account of harmonic context effects (Bharucha, 1987). The expectations for the last chord (the target) of eight-chord sequences were varied by simultaneously manipulating the harmonic relationship of the target to the first six chords (global context) and to the seventh chord (local context). Human performances demonstrated that harmonic expectancies are derived from both the global and local levels of musical structur…

Regular rhythmic primes boost P600 in grammatical error processing in dyslexic adults and matched controls

International audience; Regular musical rhythms orient attention over time and facilitate processing. Previous research has shown that regular rhythmic stimulation benefits subsequent syntax processing in children with dyslexia and specific language impairment. The present EEG study examined the influence of a rhythmic musical prime on the P600 late evoked-potential, associated with grammatical error detection for dyslexic adults and matched controls. Participants listened to regular or irregular rhythmic prime sequences followed by grammatically correct and incorrect sentences. They were required to perform grammaticality judgments for each auditorily presented sentence while EEG was recor…

Implicit Learning of Regularities in Western Tonal Music by Self-Organization

Western tonal music is a highly structured system whose regularities are implicitly learned in everyday life. A hierarchical self-organizing network simulates learning of tonal regularities by mere exposure to musical material. The trained network provides a parsimonious account of empirical findings on perceived tone, chord and key relationships and suggests activation as a unifying mechanism underlying a range of cognitive tasks.

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…

The Regularity of Rhythmic Primes Influences Syntax Processing in Adults

Recent research has shown that auditory rhythmic stimulation improves subsequent syntax processing of speech in children with and without developmental language disorders. Sensitivity to grammatica...

Effect of Context on the Perception of Pitch Structures

Connectionist simulation of tonal knowledge representation

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Influence of Global Structure on Musical Target Detection and Recognition

The present study adapted a paradigm used in visual perception by Biederman, Glass, and Stacy (1973) and analyzed the influence of a coherent global context on the detection and recognition of musical target excerpts. Global coherence was modified by segmenting minuets into chunks of four, two, or one bar. These chunks were either reordered (Experiments 1, 3, 4, 5) or transposed to different keys (Experiment 2). The results indicate that target detection is influenced only by a reorganization on a very local level (i.e. chunks of one bar). Context incoherence did not influence the recognition of the real targets, but rendered the rejection of wrong target excerpts (foils) more difficult. Th…

Cognitive priming in sung and instrumental music: Activation of inferior frontal cortex

Neural correlates of the processing of musical syntax-like structures have been investigated via expectancy violation due to musically unrelated (i.e., unexpected) events in musical contexts. Previous studies reported the implication of inferior frontal cortex in musical structure processing. However - due to the strong musical manipulations - activations might be explained by sensory deviance detection or repetition priming. Our present study investigated neural correlates of musical structure processing with subtle musical violations in a musical priming paradigm. Instrumental and sung sequences ended on related and less-related musical targets. The material controlled sensory priming com…

Rhythmic and textural musical sequences differently influence syntax and semantic processing in children.

International audience; Effects of music on language processing have been reported separately for syntax and for semantics. Previous studies have shown that regular musical rhythms can facilitate syntax processing and that semantic features of musical excerpts can inZluence semantic processing of words. It remains unclear whether musical parameters, such as rhythm and sound texture, may speciZically inZluence different components of linguistic processing. In the current study, two types of musical sequences (one focusing on rhythm and the other focusing on sound texture) were presented to children who were requested to perform a syntax or a semantic task thereafter. The results revealed tha…

Apprendre la musique: Perspectives sur l’apprentissage implicite de la musique et implications pédagogiques

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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…

Priming paradigm reveals harmonic structure processing in congenital amusia.

Abstract Deficits for pitch structure processing in congenital amusia has been mostly reported for melodic stimuli and explicit judgments. The present study investigated congenital amusia with harmonic stimuli and a priming task. Amusic and control participants performed a speeded phoneme discrimination task on sung chord sequences. The target phoneme was sung either on a functionally important chord (tonic chord, referred to as “related target”) or a less important one (subdominant chord, referred to as “less-related target”). Correct response times were faster when the target phoneme was sung on tonic chords rather than on subdominant chords, and this effect was less pronounced, albeit si…

The Regularity of Rhythmic Primes Influences Syntax Processing in Adults

Recent research has shown that auditory rhythmic stimulation improves subsequent syntax processing of speech in children with and without developmental language disorders. Sensitivity to grammatical errors is enhanced after regular rhythmic primes in comparison to irregular ones. Our present study investigated this rhythmic priming effect in healthy adults by using subtle grammatical errors as targets, aiming to fit with the high linguistic level of the participants. We also assessed whether participants’ sensitivity to rhythmic priming on syntax processing was related to self-reported rhythmic skills and musical habits. Participants listened to rhythmic regular or irregular primes followed…