8Embodying Music Flashcards
Describe some innate musical capacities
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)
At what stage can babies in utero react to loud noises?;
What occurs at about 25-26 weeks?
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)
Infants are sensitive to melodic contour. What kind of speech do they prefer?
Motherese/infant-directed speech (sensitive to speech prosody rather than language)
Why do mothers communicate through different pitch contours?;
What can motherese enhance & facilitate?
Approval, comfort, emotion, attention & warning;
Bonding & language development (emotional context; found across cultures)
What can infants discriminate from 6 months?;
From 2 months?;
Through what methods are these measured?
Pitch intervals, consonance & dissonance;
Rhythms;
Habituation-dishabituation method; head-turn procedure (includes training to maintain interest; increase reliability)
What kinds of intervals/sounds do infants prefer?
Consonant over dissonant
Describe some environmental influences on children’s musical development
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)
How do individuals connect music with their interactions with the environment?
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
How many hours of deliberate practice is necessary to achieve world-class performance (in music, chess, sport, etc)?
About 10,000 (10 years)
Music experts employ skilled memory processes, such as what?
Strategies to rapidly encode, store & retrieve information from LTM; avoid STM capacity limitations (by chunking)
What are mental schemata (or schemas)?
Mental frameworks for organizing & interpreting information; extension of memory
How are mental schemata developed?
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
Describe a novice’s musical schema
They learn passively; through exposure (e.g. radio, tv, mother singing); develop implicit knowledge
Roger Chaffin suggested the use of performance cues to retrieve a performance plan from LTM. What are examples of these?
Basic, interpretive & expressive; hierarchical chunking or motoric information
What do improvising musicians rely on?
Schemata & “grammar” knowledge, drawing on rehearsed motifs
Describe the processes of WM in music performance
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!”)
How does WM deal with musical errors?
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
What is the range model?
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)
Why is the Audio-visual (AV) or multimodal perception a faster & more effective communication of content?
When you can see the face talking to you, you get more information & accuracy of what’s being said;
Describe the McGurk effect
A mismatch of auditory & visual information leads to & a perceived third sound (e.g. auditory – ba; visual – ga; perceived – da/tha); perceptual illusion
At what level are low musical attributes communicated between performer & audience, & what do they include?
Perceptual – including note duration, timbre, lyrics, & adaptive gestures linked to performance quality
At what level are high musical attributes communicated & what do they include?;
What attributes lie somewhere in the middle?
Cognitive – performance quality; expressive/emotional intentions & audience interest;
Phrasing, tension, dynamics, rubato & overall expression
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?
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
Gesturing begins early in infancy & develops through childhood alongside speech. What has been found with bodily gestures in music performance?
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
What kinds of functions do bodily gestures in music performance serve?
Performer-audience communication; communicate attitudes (self & interpersonal); co-performer communication & coordination
What do adaptive (self-stimulation) gestures reveal about musicians?;
What do they reveal in chamber ensembles?
Their emotional or personal states (e.g. anxiety levels); personality; stage persona;
Group dynamics; roles in ensemble; power struggles & sexual politics
According to Davidson (2009), what’s involved with co-performer coordination & communication?
Emblematic, illustrative & regulatory gestures (conducting, pop ensemble & chamber ensemble)
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?
Pianists who swayed in synchrony played more synchronized;
Between conductor & ensemble; emotional intentions, phrasing, tempo regulation (in rehearsal & performance)
Various processes have been suggested that underpin sharing intentions through bodily gesture. Describe the simulation theories;
Describe the mirror neuron system
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)
Which brain regions are involved with sight-reading unfamiliar music?
Motor areas; hearing; vision areas (occipital lobe); parietal lobe (specified for conceptual spatial relations; Broca’s area (speech production)
Which brain areas are deactivated when playing music from LTM?
Broca’s area; little prefrontal cortex activation (turn off higher thought & reasoning – similar deactivation when improvising)
When has ERP evidence shown rapid fluctuation activity to occur?
Before an error is produced (the performer can anticipate the error before it happens)
What neural differences do amusics have compared to non-amusics?
They have less white matter in the pars orbitalis region of the right frontal cortex & more grey matter
Singing activates similar regions of the brain as speech. What regions are more specialized in singing?
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)
Which neural regions are activated when imagining &/or playing a melody?
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)
Which neural pathway do speaking & singing share?
Sylvanian-parietal-temporal (SPT) junction (music & language link in SPT left-lateralisation); vicinity of planum temporale
