Current advances in cognitive neuroscience of music – Levitin & Tirovolas (2009)
Introduction
- Early research focused on whole relationships in music and melody
- Recent focused on musical behaviours – listening, remembering, performing, learning and
composing
o Using neuroimaging – increasing connection of music and language both
evolutionarily and functionally
- ‘What is music’ is a common question that is unique to the study unlike in language,
perception etc
o Base on – ‘emotional communication’ by theorist Meyer or ‘organised sound’ by
composer Varese
o Artistic expression, communication, self-expression, self-discover
o Variations in pitch and rhythm impact emotional responses
- Experimenters usually hold one control consistent and vary the other to examine variations
in musical attributes
Origins
- Steven Pinker – ‘auditory cheesecake’ in that music is pointless to study as it doesn’t provide
any advantages for humans and is simply a by-product of the adaption for language,
exploiting the same circuits
- Music and other arts derive from important aspects of human cognition – theory of mind,
recursion and abstract representation
- Composition aids training of cognitive flexibility – arranging pitch, rhythm etc exercises
attentional networks
o Ancestors sang and danced for hours indicating cognition, creative minds, fitness
and motor coordination
Perception and musical structure
- 8 perceptual attributes (can be varied individually) – pitch, rhythm, timbre, tempo, meter,
contour, loudness, spatial location
o grouping by similar principles
o temporal grouping of tones into subsequences = perception of meter e.g in western
music typically 2-4 primary beats (tactus)
o Cultures develop own traditions in variation of attributes, like grammar
E.g western tonal music primary major and minor tonalities
- Was thought music was right hemi dominant and language left but now known to be
bilateral and across the cortex, neocortex, paleo and neo cerebellum
o But some lateralisation’s e.g memorisation of lyrics stronger in left, perception of
violations stronger in right
o Evidence = learning task for novel melodies and damage to both left and right mesial
temporal impaired interval recognition, but specifically, right damaged unable to use
implicit knowledge of western musical tonality to aid memory
- Human’s perception is qualitatively different from other animals, relying on pitch relations
and in turn processing of tonal relations gives appreciation of melody
- Hierarchical processing of pitch
Introduction
- Early research focused on whole relationships in music and melody
- Recent focused on musical behaviours – listening, remembering, performing, learning and
composing
o Using neuroimaging – increasing connection of music and language both
evolutionarily and functionally
- ‘What is music’ is a common question that is unique to the study unlike in language,
perception etc
o Base on – ‘emotional communication’ by theorist Meyer or ‘organised sound’ by
composer Varese
o Artistic expression, communication, self-expression, self-discover
o Variations in pitch and rhythm impact emotional responses
- Experimenters usually hold one control consistent and vary the other to examine variations
in musical attributes
Origins
- Steven Pinker – ‘auditory cheesecake’ in that music is pointless to study as it doesn’t provide
any advantages for humans and is simply a by-product of the adaption for language,
exploiting the same circuits
- Music and other arts derive from important aspects of human cognition – theory of mind,
recursion and abstract representation
- Composition aids training of cognitive flexibility – arranging pitch, rhythm etc exercises
attentional networks
o Ancestors sang and danced for hours indicating cognition, creative minds, fitness
and motor coordination
Perception and musical structure
- 8 perceptual attributes (can be varied individually) – pitch, rhythm, timbre, tempo, meter,
contour, loudness, spatial location
o grouping by similar principles
o temporal grouping of tones into subsequences = perception of meter e.g in western
music typically 2-4 primary beats (tactus)
o Cultures develop own traditions in variation of attributes, like grammar
E.g western tonal music primary major and minor tonalities
- Was thought music was right hemi dominant and language left but now known to be
bilateral and across the cortex, neocortex, paleo and neo cerebellum
o But some lateralisation’s e.g memorisation of lyrics stronger in left, perception of
violations stronger in right
o Evidence = learning task for novel melodies and damage to both left and right mesial
temporal impaired interval recognition, but specifically, right damaged unable to use
implicit knowledge of western musical tonality to aid memory
- Human’s perception is qualitatively different from other animals, relying on pitch relations
and in turn processing of tonal relations gives appreciation of melody
- Hierarchical processing of pitch
