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.

Beginners' musical instrument practice at home A survey of music-school teachers

The day-to-day instrumental work of the students of conservatories and music schools seems to be an essential condition for a fulfilling and quality musical practice. This survey, addressed to conservatory and music teachers, attempts to understand how this instrumental practice is organized at home by students and families. It deals with student autonomy, personal time and workload, the management of oral instructions, the use of written materials, the methods used to help students in difficulty as well as the role of reprimand and self-assessment during the instrumental lesson. On the teachers' side, it points to a significant use of reprimand to deal with insufficient work situations and…

Introducing implicit learning: from the laboratory to the real life

The dissociation between implicit and explicit cognition has a long history in psychology. As early as 1920, Clark Hull (25) investigated the learning of Chinese ideographs and identified the process of concept formation by abstraction of common elements, a process that occurs without explicit knowledge from the subjects of these regularities. Perceptual learning is another example of those processes that take place largely in the absence of awareness of the rules that govern the stimulations of the environment. Helmholtz (24) was one of the first to refer to implicit inference made by the perceptual system and to perceptual learning. Some years later, the distinction between implicit and e…

L’âge d’or des sciences cognitives de la musique

International audience

The Time Course of Emotional Responses to Music

Two empirical studies investigate the time course of emotional responses to music. In the first one, musically trained and untrained listeners were required to listen to 27 musical excerpts and to group those that conveyed a similar emotional meaning. In one condition, the excerpts were 25 seconds long on average. In the other condition, excerpts were as short as 1 second. The groupings were then transformed into a matrix of emotional dissimilarity that was analyzed with multidimensional scaling methods (MDS). We compared the outcome of these analyses for the 25-s and 1-s duration conditions. In the second study, we presented musical excerpts of increasing duration, varying from 250 to 20 s…

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.

Perception of musical tension in short chord sequences: The influence of harmonic function, sensory dissonance, horizontal motion, and musical training

This study investigates the effect of four variables (tonal hierarchies, sensory chordal consonance, horizontal motion, and musical training) on perceived musical tension. Participants were asked to evaluate the tension created by a chord X in sequences of three chords {C major → X → C major} in a C major context key. The X chords could be major or minor triads major-minor seventh, or minor seventh chords built on the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. The data were compared with Krumhansl’s (1990) harmonic hierarchy and with predictions of Lerdahl’s (1988) cognitive theory, Hutchinson and Knopoff’s (1978) and Parncutt’s (1989) sensory-psychoacoustical theories, and the model of horizontal mo…

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 …

Implicit learning and implicit memory in moderate to severe memory disorders

Numerous experimental psychology studies have established firmly that important parts of the human cognitive process operate automatically without the conscious or explicit control of the subjects (9). Such processes can concern memorization of episodes from life in a way that will subsequently have an implicit influence on our behavior (such as decision-making or reaction time). They can equally assist acquisition of more complex knowledge from our surroundings, by the automatic capture of the statistical regularities found in them (see Chapter “Introducing implicit learning: from the laboratory to the real life”, E. Bigand and C. Delbe). This is the way, for example, that a baby learns to…

Music in the moment? Revisiting the effect of large scale structures.

The psychological relevance of large-scale musical structures has been a matter of debate in the music community. This issue was investigated with a method that allows assessing listeners' detection of musical incoherencies in normal and scrambled versions of popular and contemporary music pieces. Musical excerpts were segmented into 28 or 29 chunks. In the scrambled version, the temporal order of these chunks was altered with the constraint that the transitions between two chunks never created local acoustical and musical disruptions. Participants were required (1) to detect on-line incoherent linking of chunks, (2) to rate aesthetic quality of pieces, and (3) to evaluate their overall co…

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…

Music as an Aid to Learn New Verbal Information in Alzheimer's Disease

the goal of this study is to assess whether new lyrics are better learned and memorized when presented in a spoken or sung form. In normal young adults, mixed results have been reported, with studies showing a positive, a negative, or a null effect of singing on verbal recall. Several factors can account for this limited aid of music. First, the familiarity of the melody might play a role. Second, successive learning sessions and long-term retention intervals may be necessary. These two factors are considered here in a case study of a participant who suffers from mild Alzheimer's disease. As expected, initial learning of new lyrics showed better performance for the spoken condition over the…

Different Brain Mechanisms Mediate Sensitivity to Sensory Consonance and Harmonic Context: Evidence from Auditory Event-Related Brain Potentials

Abstract The goal of this study was to analyze the time-course of sensory (bottom-up) and cognitive (top-down) processes that govern musical harmonic expectancy. Eight-chord sequences were presented to 12 musicians and 12 nonmusicians. Expectations for the last chord were manipulated both at the sensory level (i.e., the last chord was sensory consonant or dissonant) and at the cognitive level (the harmonic function of the target was varied by manipulating the harmonic context built up by the first six chords of the sequence). Changes in the harmonic function of the target chord mainly modulate the amplitude of a positive component peaking around 300 msec (P3) after target onset, reflecting …

Key processing precedes emotional categorization of Western music.

To investigate whether key processing precedes the appraisal of valence in music, participants listened to pairs of clips of same or different valence, played either in the same key or one semitone apart. They judged whether the second clip expressed the same emotion as the first one. Our predictions were confirmed: the response times obtained were shorter when both clips were played in the same key than when they were played one semitone apart.

The positive effect of music on source memory

Several studies have investigated how to improve episodic memory performance by manipulating the factors that are crucial for successful encoding. There is an ongoing debate about whether a complex stimulus such as music can improve memory, and in particular memory for words, rather than interfere with correct encoding of information. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate whether verbal episodic memory can be improved by background context of instrumental music. Twenty young adults were asked to memorize different lists of words presented against a background of music, environmental sounds or silence. Their episodic memory performance was then tested in terms of item and source …

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…

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…

La musique orchestre le développement

National audience

More About the Musical Expertise of Musically Untrained Listeners

Several behavioral experiments that were designed to compare the abilities of musicians and nonmusicians to process subtle changes in musical structures are surveyed. These experiments deal with different aspects of music perception including the processing of melodic and harmonic structures, the processing of large-scale structures, and implicit learning. In all these experiments, the so-called nonmusician listeners behaved in a very similar way as did highly trained students from music conservatories and music departments. This outcome suggests that when the experimental setting requires participants to process musical structures (in contrast to musical tones), the large audience of untra…

Expressive suppression and enhancement during music-elicited emotions in younger and older adults

International audience; When presented with emotional visual scenes, older adults have been found to be equally capable to regulate emotion expression as younger adults, corroborating the view that emotion regulation skills are maintained or even improved in later adulthood. However, the possibility that gaze direction might help achieve an emotion control goal has not been taken into account, raising the question whether the effortful processing of expressive regulation is really spared from the general age-related decline. Since it does not allow perceptual attention to be redirected away from the emotional source, music provides a useful way to address this question. In the present study…

Looking into the eyes of a conductor performing Lerdahl's “Time after Time”

The eye movements of a conductor were tracked during a performance of Lerdahl's “Time after time”. The analysis of the data revealed that, for most of the time, the conductor was looking at the score, rather than the performers. Most of the score-reading was in anticipation of the music to be played. Micro- and macro-anticipations could be defined, the former being between 2 to 5 seconds in advance, the later being more than 5 seconds in advance. The largest visual anticipations were as long as 10 seconds. The longer anticipations were found to correspond to the occurrence of those thematic cells the conductor considered to be of expressive importance for the piece. This suggests that the …

Global context effects on musical expectancy.

The effects of global harmonic contexts on expectancy formation were studied in a set of three experiments. Eight-chord sequences were presented to subjects. Expectations for the last chord were varied by manipulating the harmonic context created by the first six: in one context, the last chord was part of an authentic cadence (V–I), whereas in the other, it was a fourth harmonic degree following a full cadence (I–IV). Given this change in harmonic function, the last chord was assumed to be more expected in the former context, all the other local parameters being held constant. The effect of global context on expectancy formation was supported by the fact that subjects reported a lower degr…

Musical stucture modulates semantic priming in vocal music.

International audience

The Influence of Music on Prefrontal Cortex during Episodic Encoding and Retrieval of Verbal Information: A Multichannel fNIRS Study.

Music can be thought of as a complex stimulus able to enrich the encoding of an event thus boosting its subsequent retrieval. However, several findings suggest that music can also interfere with memory performance. A better understanding of the behavioral and neural processes involved can substantially improve knowledge and shed new light on the most efficient music-based interventions. Based on fNIRS studies on music, episodic encoding, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), this work aims to extend previous findings by monitoring the entire lateral PFC during both encoding and retrieval of verbal material. Nineteen participants were asked to encode lists of words presented with eit…

Distinct effects of positive and negative music on older adults' auditory target identification performances.

Older adults, compared to younger adults, are more likely to attend to pleasant situations and avoid unpleasant ones. Yet, it is unclear whether such a phenomenon may be generalized to musical emotions. In this study, we investigated whether there is an age-related difference in how musical emotions are experienced and how positive and negative music influences attention performances in a target identification task. Thirty-one young and twenty-eight older adults were presented with 40 musical excerpts conveying happiness, peacefulness, sadness, and threat. While listening to music, participants were asked to rate their feelings and monitor each excerpt for the occurrence of an auditory tar…

Effect of synchronized or desynchronized music listening during osteopathic treatment: An EEG study

While background music is often used during osteopathic treatment, it remains unclear whether it facilitates treatment, and, if it does, whether it is listening to music or jointly listening to a common stimulus that is most important. We created three experimental situations for a standard osteopathic procedure in which patients and practitioner listened either to silence, to the same music in synchrony, or (unknowingly) to different desynchronized montages of the same material. Music had no effect on heart rate and arterial pressure pre- and posttreatment compared to silence, but EEG measures revealed a clear effect of synchronized versus desynchronized listening: listening to desynchroni…

Les bienfaits de la musique sur le cerveau

International audience; Aujourd'hui, les neurosciences cognitives montrent que la musique est un vecteur de plasticité cérébrale qui modifie le cerveau de ceux qui pratiquent un instrument mais aussi de ceux qui écoutent simplement une oeuvre musicale. En fait, la musique touche au plus profond notre cerveau en coordonnant l'activité de nombreux circuits cérébraux liés à des expériences cognitives et affectives très importantes pour la mémoire. Ce qui expliquerait pourquoi elle a des effets bénéfiques sur le développement intellectuel de l'enfant, pourquoi elle ralentit le vieillissement cognitif et améliore la mémoire et d'où lui viennent ses nombreux effets thérapeutiques, de la régulatio…

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…

Music, emotion, and time perception: the influence of subjective emotional valence and arousal?

The present study used a temporal bisection task with short (< 2 s) and long (> 2 s) stimulus durations to investigate the effect on time estimation of several musical parameters associated with emotional changes in affective valence and arousal. In order to manipulate the positive and negative valence of music, Experiments 1 and 2 contrasted the effect of musical structure with pieces played normally and backwards, which were judged to be pleasant and unpleasant, respectively. This effect of valence was combined with a subjective arousal effect by changing the tempo of the musical pieces (fast vs. slow) (Experiment 1) or their instrumentation (orchestral vs. piano pieces). The musica…

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…

Less Effort, Better Results: How Does Music Act on Prefrontal Cortex in Older Adults during Verbal Encoding? An fNIRS Study

Several neuroimaging studies of cognitive aging revealed deficits in episodic memory abilities as a result of prefrontal cortex (PFC) limitations. Improving episodic memory performance despite PFC deficits is thus a critical issue in aging research. Listening to music stimulates cognitive performance in several non-purely musical activities (e.g., language and memory). Thus, music could represent a rich and helpful source during verbal encoding and therefore help subsequent retrieval. Furthermore, such benefit could be reflected in less demand of PFC, which is known to be crucial for encoding processes. This study aimed to investigate whether music may improve episodic memory in older adult…

How functional coupling between the auditory cortex and the amygdala induces musical emotion: a single case study.

Music is a sound structure of remarkable acoustical and temporal complexity. Although it cannot denote specific meaning, it is one of the most potent and universal stimuli for inducing mood. How the auditory and limbic systems interact, and whether this interaction is lateralized when feeling emotions related to music, remains unclear. We studied the functional correlation between the auditory cortex (AC) and amygdala (AMY) through intracerebral recordings from both hemispheres in a single patient while she listened attentively to musical excerpts, which we compared to passive listening of a sequence of pure tones. While the left primary and secondary auditory cortices (PAC and SAC) showed …

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…

L'apprentissage implicite de la musique occidentale

International audience; L’apprentissage implicite désigne une forme d’apprentissage durant laquelle nous intériorisons tacitement la structure des stimulations qui nous parviennent de l’environnement. La musique constitue une structure écologique de cet environnement qui présente de nombreux intérêts pour l’étude des apprentissages implicites. Réciproquement, les travaux actuels sur l’apprentissage implicite sont importants pour les sciences de la musique car ils conduisent à repenser le statut des compétences cognitives requises pour les activités musicales. Dans ce chapitre, nous montrerons qu'il est très probable que les connaissances implicites acquises par l’auditeur sans formation mus…

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…

Measuring Aksak Rhythm and Synchronization in Transylvanian Village Music by Using Motion Capture

<p>Techniques based on motion capture can be useful in <span><span style="font-size: x-small;">analyzing a wide range of musical styles and practices</span></span>: in this case, Transylvanian village music. We focused on a repertoire known as “Gypsy songs of sorrow”, played by professional Gypsy musicians during parties and celebrations of their own community. Two parameters were the object of study: rhythmic duration, and synchronization between musicians (a violinist and a viola player). Results show that rhythm is a local variant of <em>aksak</em> and is based on two duration units (S=short, L=long) which respect the formula 2:3 < S:L &am…

Perceiving musical tension in long chord sequences

We attempted to predict perceived musical tension in longer chord sequences by hierarchic and sequential models based on Lerdahl and Jackendoff's and Lerdahl's cognitive theories and on Parncutt's sensory-psychoacoustical theory. Musicians and nonmusicians were asked to rate the perceived tension of chords which were drawn either from a piece composed for the study (Exp. 1) or from a Chopin Prelude (Exps. 2-4). In Exps. 3 and 4, several experimental manipulations were made to emphasize either the global or the local structure of the piece and to verify how these manipultions would affect the respective contribution of the models in the ratings. In all experiments, musical tension was only w…

Auditory Training in Deaf Children

Deaf children are, earlier than in the past, identified and can benefit of new and highperformance devices (as cochlear implants or digital hearing aids). However, a great variability in their spoken language skills is observed (12) and first attributable to the well-known effect of the age of auditory rehabilitation (15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22). The second assessment concerns the way speech disorders are treated: new technologies are not linked to any change in the way speech therapy is delivered, particularly in the field of auditory training. Auditory training constitutes an important part of the speech therapy addressed to the deaf children and must start as soon as possible. The go…

Divided attention in music

Two models have been advanced to account for the apparent ease with which attention can be divided in music: a “divided attention” model postulates that listeners effectively manage to follow two or more melodic lines played simultaneously. According to a “figure-ground model,” the harmonic coherence of Western polyphonies allows a listener to focus on one melody while staying aware of the other melody, which acts as a background. This figure-ground processing compensates for the inability to divide attention. The present study was designed to further investigate these two models. Participants were required to detect melodic errors in two familiar nursery tunes played simultaneously an octa…

Sight-reading expertise: cross-modality integration investigated using eye tracking

International audience; It is often said that experienced musicians are capable of hearing what they read (and vice versa). This suggests that they are able to process and to integrate multimodal information. The present study investigates this issue with an eye-tracking technique. Two groups of musicians chosen on the basis of their level of expertise (experts, non-experts) had to read excerpts of poorly-known classical piano music and play them on a keyboard. The experiment was run in two consecutive phases during which each excerpt was (1) read without playing and (2) sight-read (read and played). In half the conditions, the participants heard the music before the reading phases. The exc…

Investigation of the relationships between audio features and induced emotions in Contemporary Western music

International audience; This paper focuses on emotion recognition and under-standing in Contemporary Western music. The study seeks to investigate the relationship between perceived emotion and musical features in the fore-mentioned mus-ical genre. A set of 27 Contemporary music excerpts is used as stimuli to gather responses from both musicians and non-musicians which are then mapped on an emo-tional plane in terms of arousal and valence dimensions. Audio signal analysis techniques are applied to the corpus and a base feature set is obtained. The feature set contains characteristics ranging from low-level spectral and tem-poral acoustic features to high-level contextual features. The featu…

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…

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…

Individual differences in granularity of the affective responses to music

The main focus of the paper is the role of listeners’ emotion-relevant characteristics and musical expertise in the granularity of affective responses to music. Another objective of the study is to test the consistency of the granularity of affect that is perceived in music and/or experienced in response to it. In Experiment 1, 91 musicians and nonmusicians listened to musical excerpts and grouped them according to the similarity of the affects they experienced while listening. Finer grouping granularity was found in musicians and high rumination scorers. Male musicians with above-median scores in rumination produced a larger number of clusters than the other male participants. Experiment 2…

Manipulating Greek musical modes and tempo affects perceived musical emotion in musicians and nonmusicians.

The combined influence of tempo and mode on emotional responses to music was studied by crossing 7 changes in mode with 3 changes in tempo. Twenty-four musicians aged 19 to 25 years (12 males and 12 females) and 24 nonmusicians aged 17 to 25 years (12 males and 12 females) were required to perform two tasks: 1) listening to different musical excerpts, and 2) associating an emotion to them such as happiness, serenity, fear, anger, or sadness. ANOVA showed that increasing the tempo strongly affected the arousal (F(2,116) = 268.62, mean square error (MSE) = 0.6676, P < 0.001) and, to a lesser extent, the valence of emotional responses (F(6,348) = 8.71, MSE = 0.6196, P < 0.001). Changes in mode…

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…

Music lessons improve auditory perceptual and cognitive performance in deaf children

Despite advanced technologies in auditory rehabilitation of profound deafness, deaf children often exhibit delayed cognitive and linguistic development and auditory training remains a crucial element of their education. In the present cross-sectional study, we assess whether music would be a relevant tool for deaf children rehabilitation. In normal-hearing children, music lessons have been shown to improve cognitive and linguistic-related abilities, such as phonetic discrimination and reading. We compared auditory perception, auditory cognition, and phonetic discrimination between 14 profoundly deaf children who completed weekly music lessons for a period of 1.5 to 4 years and 14 deaf child…

Catégorisation asymétrique de séquences de hauteurs musicales

Asymmetric Categorization in the Sequential Auditory Domain An unusual visual category learning asymmetry in infants was observed by Quinn, Eimas, and Rosenkrantz (1993). A series of experiments and simulations seemed to show that this asymmetry was due the perceptual inclusion of the cat category within the dog category because of the greater perceptual variability of the distributions of the visual features of dogs compared to cats (Mareschal & French, 1997; Mareschal, French, & Quinn, 2000; French, Mermillod, Quinn, & Mareschal, 2001; French, Mareschal, Mermillod, & Quinn, 2004). In the present paper, we explore whether this asymmetric categorization phenomenon generalizes to the auditor…

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…

The societal contexts for sound and music computing: Research, education, industry, and socio-culture

Abstract The paper addresses the various contexts that determine the societal framework for research in the field of sound and music computing. Four of these contexts are identified, namely, the research context, the educational context, the industrial context and the socio-cultural context. For each context, the major trends are analysed and summarized as short statements, thus providing a background in which the state-of-the-art and the challenges of sound and music research can be situated.

On listening to atonal variants of two Piano Sonatas by Beethoven

International audience; We investigated the contribution of tonal relationships to the perception of musical ideas and to the feelings of "arousal." Two excerpts of piano sonatas by Beethoven and two atonal variants were used as experimental stimuli. This manipulation destroyed the tonal relationships but preserved both the local and global temporal organization (rhythm and formal). Listeners were asked to indicate the onset of musical ideas, to estimate the arousing properties of the music in a continuous response task, and to rate the similarity of the pieces. A drastic change in the pitch structure strongly affected judgments of similarity. However, it had no effect on the segmentation o…

Rethinking physical and rehabilitation medicine: new technologies induce new learning strategies

International audience; Reeducation consists in training people injured by either illness or the vagaries of life to achieve the best fundionality now possible for them. Strangely, the subject is not taught in the normal educational curricula of the relevant professions. Reeducation thus tends to be developed anew with each patient, without recourse to knowledge of what such training, or assistance in such training, might be. However, new paradigms of reeducation are in fact possible today, thanks to advances in cognitive science and the development of new technologies such as virtual reality and robotics. In turn, they lead to the rethinking of the procedures of physical medicine, as well …

Musique et cerveau : nouveaux concepts, nouvelles applications

International audience; La musique accompagne toute notre vie elle en rythme les étapes, trompe la solitude ou à l'opposé favorise la convivialité et encore en illumine certains moments. Mais elle ne relève pas seulement d'un simple loisir ou d'un moyen d'expression des sentiments. Elle s'enracine profondément dans notre cerveau en coordonnant l'activité de nombreux circuits cérébraux corticaux et sous-corticaux associés à des expériences cognitives, affectives et corporelles. Le pouvoir de la musique sur l'humain fascine aujourd'hui la société. La littérature scientifique s'est enrichie ces dernières décennies de très nombreux travaux précisant les effets de la musique sur le cerveau. L'ob…

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.

Escala multidimensional aplicada aos estudos de apreciação musical

The multidimensional scaling (MDS) originates from a set of techniques for analyzing proximity of data, which is obtained through the judgments of participants who concomitantly compare several stimuli in various dimensions. The analysis of proximity judgments produces an analysis in which points represent the relationship existent between stimuli in a Euclidean space. The configuration of stimuli in the space defined by these dimensions permits to make inferences about the underlying perceptual universe of the studied group. Literature reveals that MDS is enlarging the study of music and the measurement of its structural properties. La escala multidimensional (MDS) deriva de una familia de…

50 ans de psychologie de la musique

International audience; Il y a cinquante ans paraissait La perception de la musique, ouvrage majeur par lequel Robert Francès instituait une forme novatrice d’approche du fait musical. Son style, sa cohérence scientifique, joints à une assise culturelle et à des intuitions exceptionnelles, lui confèrent une place d’autorité inégalée. Cette oeuvre vaut toujours à Robert Francès un important capital de sympathie et de respect souvent résumé par le titre de « père de la psychologie de la musique française ». L’héritage de La perception de la musiquese doit d’être pensé, débattu et analysé, surtout lorsque cinquante années de recul nous le permettent. C’est là tout le projet de ce recueil. Il r…

The emergence of explicit knowledge during the early phase of learning in sequential reaction time tasks

Five experiments investigated the formation of explicit knowledge of a repeating sequence in a sequential reaction time task. Reliable explicit knowledge was obtained even though various conditions prevented the selective improvement of RTs (Exps. 1–4). This knowledge emerged early during training. Participants were able to recognize segments of the sequence (Exps. 3 and 4) or correctly assess the probabilities of transition of the target between successive locations (Exp. 5) after only two blocks of training trials. These findings rule out an interpretation of sequence learning that posits that explicit knowledge emerges from implicit knowledge during the course of training. Although these…

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...

The time course of emotional response to music

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Effect of Context on the Perception of Pitch Structures

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…

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:…

Cognition et émotion musicales

Musical Cognition and Emotion. Music is a cultural stimulus that has no obvious adaptive value for the human species, but that nevertheless provokes emotional responses as intense as other stimuli that are biologically relevant. For this reason, music is a privileged medium to study the complex interactions between cognition and emotion. In this article, we will consider the present knowledge from neurosciences and psychology of music that make it possible to better understand these interactions. According to a first viewpoint, the emotional response occurs before cognitive processes can take place. An emotional response can therefore occur within the first hundredths of a second, when list…

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…

Investigation of the Effect of Mode and Tempo on Emotional Responses to Music Using EEG Power Asymmetry

The combined interactions of mode and tempo on emotional responses to music were investigated using both self-reports and electroencephalogram (EEG) activity. A musical excerpt was performed in three different modes and tempi. Participants rated the emotional content of the resulting nine stimuli and their EEG activity was recorded. Musical modes influence the valence of emotion with major mode being evaluated happier and more serene, than minor and locrian modes. In EEG frontal activity, major mode was associated with an increased alpha activation in the left hemisphere compared to minor and locrian modes, which, in turn, induced increased activation in the right hemisphere. The tempo mod…

Composition et cognition musicales : création, perception, appréciation

Ce texte est un rapport de fin de recherche issu de l'ACI cognitique.; Ce projet avait pour objet d'apporter des éléments objectifs de réflexion sur les possibilités et limites de la perception et de la compréhension des matériaux et des structures d'une oeuvre de musique contemporaine. Les buts spécifiques comprenaient l'étude : 1) des processus d'invention et de résolution de problèmes dans la composition musicale, 2) des processus de traitement perceptif et de mémorisation des matériaux musicaux, 3) du traitement perceptif et mnésique des variations ou transformations opérées sur ces matériaux et de l'intégration des matériaux et de leurs transformations dans une forme d'ensemble, 4) du …

Emotional Responses During Music Listening

The aim of this chapter is to summarize and present the current knowledge about music and emotion from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Existing emotional models and their adequacy in describing emotional responses to music are described and discussed in different applications. The underlying emotion induction mechanisms beside cognitive appraisal are presented, and their implications on the field are analyzed. Musical characteristics such as tempo, mode, loudness, and so on are inherent properties of the musical structure and have been shown to influence the emotional states during music listening. The role of each individual parameter on emotional responses as well as their interactions …

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…

Multidimensional scaling of emotional responses to music: The effect of musical expertise and of the duration of the excerpts

Musically trained and untrained listeners were required to listen to 27 musical excerpts and to group those that conveyed a similar emotional meaning (Experiment 1). The groupings were transformed into a matrix of emotional dissimilarity that was analysed through multidimensional scaling methods (MDS). A 3-dimensional space was found to provide a good fit of the data, with arousal and emotional valence as the primary dimensions. Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed the consistency of this 3-dimensional space using excerpts of only 1 second duration. The overall findings indicate that emotional responses to music are very stable within and between participants, and are weakly influenced by musical …

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…

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…