Search results for "Musical syntax"
showing 10 items of 12 documents
Processing of Musical Syntax Tonic versus Subdominant: An Event-related Potential Study
2006
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…
Effects of Selective Attention on Syntax Processing in Music and Language
2010
Abstract The present study investigated the effects of auditory selective attention on the processing of syntactic information in music and speech using event-related potentials. Spoken sentences or musical chord sequences were either presented in isolation, or simultaneously. When presented simultaneously, participants had to focus their attention either on speech, or on music. Final words of sentences and final harmonies of chord sequences were syntactically either correct or incorrect. Irregular chords elicited an early right anterior negativity (ERAN), whose amplitude was decreased when music was simultaneously presented with speech, compared to when only music was presented. However, t…
Expertise in folk music alters the brain processing of Western harmony
2012
In various paradigms of modern neurosciences of music, experts of Western classical music have displayed superior brain architecture when compared with individuals without explicit training in music. In this paper, we show that chord violations embedded in musical cadences were neurally processed in a facilitated manner also by musicians trained in Finnish folk music. This result, obtained by using early right anterior negativity (ERAN) as an index of harmony processing, suggests that tonal processing is advanced in folk musicians by their long-term exposure to both Western and non-Western music.
The Relative Importance of Local and Global Structures in Music Perception
2004
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…
Empirical evidence for musical syntax processing? Computer simulations reveal the contribution of auditory short-term memory
2014
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.…
Boosting syntax training with temporally regular musical primes in children with cochlear implants
2018
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…
A module for syntactic processing in music?
2006
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.
RECURRENT SELF-ORGANIZATION OF SENSORY SIGNALS IN THE AUDITORY DOMAIN
2008
In this study, a psychoacoustical and connectionist modeling framework is proposed for the investigation of musical cognition. It is suggested that music perception involves the manipulation of 1) sensory representations that have correlations with psychoacoustical features of the stimulus, and 2) abstract representations of the statistical regularities underlying a particular musical syntax. In the implicit learning domain, sensory features have been shown to interact with the processes involved in the extraction of the regularities governing musical events combinations in a stream [e.g., 1]. Furthermore, in a more ecological context, it is well known that traditional Western tonal system …
The influence of task-irrelevant music on language processing: syntactic and semantic structures.
2011
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 effect of harmonic context on phoneme monitoring in vocal music
2001
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…