8Embodying Music

Question 1

Describe some innate musical capacities

Answer 1

Hearing and decoding frequency – pitch, timbre (key, harmony); perceiving beat, rhythm, tempo (meter); sensitivity to loudness; multisensory neural connections; motor skill capabilities; genetic predisposition for body attributes (e.g. piano players need long fingers, wide digit span)

Question 2

At what stage can babies in utero react to loud noises?;

What occurs at about 25-26 weeks?

Answer 2

9 weeks;
Maturation of sensory organs (cochlear) & CNS; sensitive to sounds of the mother; can hear rhythmic sounds (e.g. breathing, heart); digestive sounds; vocal sounds; sensitive to external environment sounds; pitch, timing & loudness (dampened approximately 30dB)

Question 3

Infants are sensitive to melodic contour. What kind of speech do they prefer?

Answer 3

Motherese/infant-directed speech (sensitive to speech prosody rather than language)

Question 4

Why do mothers communicate through different pitch contours?;
What can motherese enhance & facilitate?

Answer 4

Approval, comfort, emotion, attention & warning;

Bonding & language development (emotional context; found across cultures)

Question 5

What can infants discriminate from 6 months?;
From 2 months?;
Through what methods are these measured?

Answer 5

Pitch intervals, consonance & dissonance;
Rhythms;
Habituation-dishabituation method; head-turn procedure (includes training to maintain interest; increase reliability)

Question 6

What kinds of intervals/sounds do infants prefer?

Answer 6

Consonant over dissonant

Question 7

Describe some environmental influences on children’s musical development

Answer 7

Situational exposition (frequency & duration of music exposure; e.g. listening, playing, watching, singing); enculturation (sensitivity to, & familiarity with music of their own culture); home environment - parent’s (social standing, education level, music interests) & siblings (shared & unshared environmental influences)

Question 8

How do individuals connect music with their interactions with the environment?

Answer 8

Personality & temperament (readily participate in musical opportunities or not); seeking to shape their environment (request musical activities); social influence (peers; contemporary music consumption); quality teaching

Question 9

How many hours of deliberate practice is necessary to achieve world-class performance (in music, chess, sport, etc)?

Answer 9

About 10,000 (10 years)

Question 10

Music experts employ skilled memory processes, such as what?

Answer 10

Strategies to rapidly encode, store & retrieve information from LTM; avoid STM capacity limitations (by chunking)

Question 11

What are mental schemata (or schemas)?

Answer 11

Mental frameworks for organizing & interpreting information; extension of memory

Question 12

How are mental schemata developed?

Answer 12

Through active learning; involves effort; builds on basic motor & perceptual capabilities (e.g. learning to play an instrument, sing or read music); develops domain specific cognitive & motor skills (procedural knowledge & automaticity) & declarative knowledge

Question 13

Describe a novice’s musical schema

Answer 13

They learn passively; through exposure (e.g. radio, tv, mother singing); develop implicit knowledge

Question 14

Roger Chaffin suggested the use of performance cues to retrieve a performance plan from LTM. What are examples of these?

Answer 14

Basic, interpretive & expressive; hierarchical chunking or motoric information

Question 15

What do improvising musicians rely on?

Answer 15

Schemata & “grammar” knowledge, drawing on rehearsed motifs

Question 16

Describe the processes of WM in music performance

Answer 16

Hand-eye span limited to about 5-6- notes; memory retrieval for performance is incremental (holding some, but not all information); serial chain –A-B-C (behaviourist perspective); but content can be maintained when things are misplaced (e.g. spoonerisms – “what a dovely lay!”)

Question 17

How does WM deal with musical errors?

Answer 17

Slot-filter mechanism – hitting a note appropriate with the structure context (e.g.. a note in the key rather than just the nearest note) – can be perseveratory (play a note that has passed) or anticipatory (play an upcoming note); range model

Question 18

What is the range model?

Answer 18

Accounts for the range of events accessible in WM as melodies are planned & executed; infers serial proximity (notes closer are more accessible); metrical similarity (notes are more accessible if associated with a similar metrical accent)

Question 19

Why is the Audio-visual (AV) or multimodal perception a faster & more effective communication of content?

Answer 19

When you can see the face talking to you, you get more information & accuracy of what’s being said;

Question 20

Describe the McGurk effect

Answer 20

A mismatch of auditory & visual information leads to & a perceived third sound (e.g. auditory – ba; visual – ga; perceived – da/tha); perceptual illusion

Question 21

At what level are low musical attributes communicated between performer & audience, & what do they include?

Answer 21

Perceptual – including note duration, timbre, lyrics, & adaptive gestures linked to performance quality

Question 22

At what level are high musical attributes communicated & what do they include?;
What attributes lie somewhere in the middle?

Answer 22

Cognitive – performance quality; expressive/emotional intentions & audience interest;
Phrasing, tension, dynamics, rubato & overall expression

Question 23

The influence of expressive bodily movement on judgements of solo marimba performances was investigated showing either a projected/deadpan performance manner. Participants were presented with 2 different sets of 16 excerpts (AV & A).The range of tempos, difficulty levels & styles were manipulated, counterbalanced & repeated. What was recorded?;
What were the results?

Answer 23

Judgements of expressiveness & interest on two separate 7-point Likert scales;
Projected performances were considered more expressive & more interesting when presented as AV; Deadpan performances were considered more expressive & interesting when presented as A only

Question 24

Gesturing begins early in infancy & develops through childhood alongside speech. What has been found with bodily gestures in music performance?

Answer 24

They’re a natural facet of advanced music rehearsal & performance; there are regularities (e.g. music structure & gestural types – people do a particular gesture at the end of a phrase); but style & deployment are highly individual

Question 25

What kinds of functions do bodily gestures in music performance serve?

Answer 25

Performer-audience communication; communicate attitudes (self & interpersonal); co-performer communication & coordination

Question 26

What do adaptive (self-stimulation) gestures reveal about musicians?;
What do they reveal in chamber ensembles?

Answer 26

Their emotional or personal states (e.g. anxiety levels); personality; stage persona;
Group dynamics; roles in ensemble; power struggles & sexual politics

Question 27

According to Davidson (2009), what’s involved with co-performer coordination & communication?

Answer 27

Emblematic, illustrative & regulatory gestures (conducting, pop ensemble & chamber ensemble)

Question 28

Keller & Appel rigged up pianists to a motion capture system & recorded movements of joints (acceleration & velocity). What did they find?;
What else is synchronizing important for?

Answer 28

Pianists who swayed in synchrony played more synchronized;

Between conductor & ensemble; emotional intentions, phrasing, tempo regulation (in rehearsal & performance)

Question 29

Various processes have been suggested that underpin sharing intentions through bodily gesture. Describe the simulation theories;
Describe the mirror neuron system

Answer 29

Putting oneself in another’s shoes; sharing of meaning; similar neural representation activated for observed & effected/planned actions;
Transforming observed actions (audio-visual information) into motor representations (modified by training)

Question 30

Which brain regions are involved with sight-reading unfamiliar music?

Answer 30

Motor areas; hearing; vision areas (occipital lobe); parietal lobe (specified for conceptual spatial relations; Broca’s area (speech production)

Question 31

Which brain areas are deactivated when playing music from LTM?

Answer 31

Broca’s area; little prefrontal cortex activation (turn off higher thought & reasoning – similar deactivation when improvising)

Question 32

When has ERP evidence shown rapid fluctuation activity to occur?

Answer 32

Before an error is produced (the performer can anticipate the error before it happens)

Question 33

What neural differences do amusics have compared to non-amusics?

Answer 33

They have less white matter in the pars orbitalis region of the right frontal cortex & more grey matter

Question 34

Singing activates similar regions of the brain as speech. What regions are more specialized in singing?

Answer 34

More right-lateralised activation in the ventral motor region; increased auditory activation (auditory feedback enhances sensitivity to the input); Broca’s area activated when singing simple/complex tasks (more complex tasks associated with planum temporale activation)

Question 35

Which neural regions are activated when imagining &/or playing a melody?

Answer 35

There’s much neural overlap; auditory cortex (right-lateralised for melodies associated with lyrics); both tasks activate supplementary motor cortex area (people hum/sing when they imagine/hear a tune)

Question 36

Which neural pathway do speaking & singing share?

Answer 36

Sylvanian-parietal-temporal (SPT) junction (music & language link in SPT left-lateralisation); vicinity of planum temporale