Lecture: The Cognitive Science of Music

Question 1

What is music?

Answer 1

• Music is…Sound and sound vibration, A breath of sound which passes by and is gone, A form of expression, An industry
• Best definition: ‘Music psychology inherently covers, and connects, the different disciplines of psychology (such as perception, attention, memory, language, action, and emotion) and is special in that it can combine these different disciplines in coherent, integrative frameworks of both theory and research.’

Question 2

How long has the concept of music cognition been around?

Answer 2

it’s been around as long as cog sci

• cog sci coined in 1973
• 1 st computational models of Music cognition in 1976

Question 3

Why is music considered peripheral compared to vision and language?

Answer 3

-pinker ‘music is useless”
-Music is less accessible to those without training
(compared to language)

Question 4

What are the 3 fold links between music and cognitive science?

Answer 4

• Music is a universal human trait
• Music is crucial to human evolution; it is a precursor to the evolution of language
• Music engages cognitive processes such as perception and emotion

Question 5

Is music a universal human trait?

Answer 5

Despite huge diversity, ‘every known human society has what trained musicologists would recognize as music’

Question 6

What are the Cross-cultural functions of music?

Answer 6

• Social bonding
• Emotional (self) regulation
• Mother infant interaction
• Healing
• Religious rituals
• Aesthetic experience

Question 7

What are the 2 main alternatives for where music comes from?

Answer 7

I. Music is a spandrel (Pinker’s auditory cheesecake hypothesis)
II. Music was directly shaped by evolutionary forces
(Darwin’s sexual selection hypothesis, Dunbar’s social bonding hypothesis, Hagen & Bryant’s coalition signalling hypothesis)

Question 8

What is Pinker’s auditory cheesecake hypothesis?

Answer 8

• In terms of survival, music is useless. Byproduct of evolution, specifically a derivative of language
• Evolutionary spandrel

Question 9

What is the sexual selection hypothesis?

Answer 9

• Bird songs and human music serve as courtship displays
• Sexual selection: ‘we may assume that musical tones and rhythm were used by our half-human ancestors during the season of courtship
• Music is closely intertwined with dancing: Aerobic fitness, Strength, Health

Question 10

What is Dunbar’s social bonding hypothesis?

Answer 10

• Social grooming was replaced by social bonding (language and music)
• The biological basis of music and social bonding
• Music is an external rhythmic framework that facilitates synchrony and synchronized movements release endorphins:
• Linked to social bonding in primate species
• Linked to human social behaviours (e.g., laughter, sync. Sports)
• Linked to musical activities (e.g., singing and dancing)
• Passively listening to music engaged the endogenous opioid system

Question 11

What is Hagen and Bryant’s coalition signalling hypothesis?

Answer 11

• The sexual selection hypothesis and social bonding hypothesis do not explain the widespread performance of music and dance between groups
• Proposal: music and dance evolved from coordinated territorial defence signals

Question 12

How do animals support the coalition signalling hypothesis?

Answer 12

• A duet of already mated birds serves as territorial defence
• Members of Wyoming coyote packs howled along the periphery of their territory; lonely coyotes did not howl

Question 13

What is the support for the evolutionary perspective?

Answer 13

• Music has several characteristics that are indicative of it being an ‘evolutionary adaptive behaviour’
• • Subject to direct elective pressure
• • It is ancient (the earliest archeological evidence being bone and mammoth-tusk ivory pipes dating to before 42.000 BP)
• • It is a cross-cultural ability
• • Has the ability to express and trigger emotions and alter psychological states

Question 14

What is the evidence against the evolutionary hypothesis?

Answer 14

-Did sexual selection shape human music?
-Does music ability predict mating success?
-Tested these questions with over 10,000 twins
Mating assessed as: Number of sex partners, Age of first intercourse, Sociosexuality, Number of offspring
-Results: no support for the claim that music
predicts mating success

Question 15

What came first? Music or language?

Answer 15

• Little agreement:
• Language precedes music
• Music precedes language
• Common musilanguage precursor

Question 16

Language & music: EEG experiment

Answer 16

• Brain’s response to music and language
• Syntactic violation (P600)
• Syntactic violation in language
• Syntactic violation chords in music
• Statistically indistinguishable in amplitude and scalp distribution in the P600 range (this means that the processing of one error and the other happened in the same place in the brain, meaning that language and music are processed in the same place in the brain)
• P600 may not be a language specific ERP peak

Question 17

Language & music: Recursive processing

Answer 17

• Complexity of music
• Believed to be a unique feature of human language. Maybe not?
• Recursion in music: video in slides
• Recursion in math factorials 5!=120 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 (4! X 5)
• I saw the boy [who kissed the girl [who met Mary [ who is married to john [who works with Chris]]]]

Question 18

Language & music: memory

Answer 18

• The case of PM, a 68 year old professional cellist
• He developed severe amnesia following encephalitis
• Despite severe memory impairments, he performed as well as healthy
• individuals on tests of memory recognition for music
• Findings suggest a dissociation between musical memory and semantic memory (i.e., a new kind of memory)

Question 19

is foreign accent easier to notice in singing or speaking?

Answer 19

• More difficult to detect foreign accents in singing
• Previously reported in trained singers
• Mageau was the first to show this also holds true in untrained singers
• The imposed duration and pitch hide important linguistic cues
• Applications: it is imperative to teach intonation to second language speakers

Question 20

Which is a greater contributor to native like-fluency? Prosody or Grammar/syntax?

Answer 20

-Participants rated sentences on a fluency scale

‘bad’ prosody and ‘intact’ grammar was rated as less native-like than ‘intact prosody’ and ‘bad’ grammar

Question 21

What is the neurochemistry of music (serotonin)?

Answer 21

• Serotonin is a neurotransmitter linked to happiness
• Changes of serotonin during short term music perception
• 2 conditions, order randomized: Pleasant music, Unpleasant music
• Blood samples –> centrifuge –> platelet pallet –> serotonin
• Pleasant music increased the release of serotonin while unpleasant music reduced its release in the brain

Question 22

What is the neurochemistry of music (dopamine)?

Answer 22

• Dopamine is a NT linked to sex, drugs, rock and roll, motivation and pleasure
• 2 conditions, order randomized (23 s of classical music from various pieces- intact, 23 s of classical music from various pieces- scrambled)
• Changes of dopamine levels during short term classical music listening of intact pieces (1st condition)
• fMRI activation in areas involved in the mesolimbic dopaminergic pathway which is crucial to reward processing

Question 23

What is music and Parkinson’s disease?

Answer 23

• PD is a neurological disorder involving the degeneration of the dopaminergic system
• Dopamine is released when listening to pleasant music
• Listening to music leads to substantial effects on: movement-related symptoms, psychological symptoms (fewer studies and less certain results)

Question 24

Music and Stress

Answer 24

• Patients about to undergo surgery
• 2 conditions: Listen to music, Anti-anxiety drugs
• Findings: individuals who listened to music reported less anxiety and had lower cortisol levels
• Concerns? No comparison between the duration of music or taking drugs, Self-report is not reliable, especially in hospital pre-surgery (the more critical the situation the less we can trust it)

Question 25

Music imagery and auditory cortex activation

Answer 25

-Individuals listened to songs during an fMRI experiment
-With and without lyrics
-Familiar and unfamiliar songs
-Short sections of music were replaced by silence
-Results: There was auditory cortex activation during the silence gap, This activation “corresponds to the phenomenological experience of
imagining music”.

Question 26

What is the Mcgurk effect?

Answer 26

• Our eyes tell us what we hear
• The McGurk effect is cognitively impenetrable
• What does that mean? Skilled musicians are not subject to the McGurk effect (can’t turn it on and off, cant through an act of will turn it on and off)

Question 27

Speech to song

Answer 27

-After 11 repetitions of the same identical recording, participants heard it as a song:
- Individual (sounds like a song)
-Chorus (sounds like everyone singing together)
-After 1 repetition paricipant heard it as speech:
- Individual (sounded like someone saying a sentence)
-Chorus (sounded like everyone saying the same thing)
When the stimulus was repeated, the subjects sang the phrase back
-They produced fundamental frequencies that were both closer to those of the original recording and corresponded more closely to musical intervals

Question 28

What does song perception entail?

Answer 28

• An increase in the salience of fundamental frequencies making up a perceived phrase (focus shifts from understanding what someone is saying to fundamental frequencies, think of it in terms of rounding semitones. We round up or down to the nearest semitone)
• A perceptual transformation of the fundamental frequencies, matching them to expected statistical characteristics of music (such as a predominance of intervals that are multiples of a semitones)

Question 29

Phantom words

Answer 29

• What we ‘hear’ is strongly influenced, not only by the sounds that reach us, but also by our knowledge, beliefs and expectations
• Phantom words track: Contain one or two words composed of two syllables, These words are repeated over and over again, Our minds create many different combinations of sounds
• Close to exam time, students may hear phrases like ‘I’m tired’ ‘no brain’ or ‘no time’
• Female students often report the word ‘love’ while male students are more likely to report sexually explicit words and phrases

Question 30

Can we hear lyrics that aren’t there?

Answer 30

• Your brain is able to recognize the lyrics and the vocals if you already know the lyrics
• If you don’t know the songs, listen to the lyrics and then revisit the illusions

Question 31

What is generating sine wave speech?

Answer 31

• Sine wave speech is generated by using a formant tracker to detect the formant frequencies found in an utterance and then synthesizing sine waves that track the centre of these formants

Question 32

Temporal induction of speech

Answer 32

• Write down the sentence you hear in both recordings: No cough, Cough
• Under certain conditions, signals may be perceived as continuous even when temporal gaps are deliberately inserted and filled with noise
• Cough condition: most people hear the complete sentence and find it very difficult to work out which phoneme has been deleted
• Silence condition: people have trouble making up the word