Responding To Music

Question 1

What is important in terms of how we respond to music?

Answer 1

Long-term memory of music

Question 2

What songs tend to be remembered well even if the pitch is off?

Answer 2

Simple songs such as Happy Birthday

We have a collective memory for happy birthday, irrespective of pitch.

Question 3

Describe the study by Levitin (2007) on memorising music

Answer 3

Asked people to sing pop songs that they knew from recordings

Question 4

What did Levitin (2007) find in terms of memorising music?

Answer 4

The recording is in a particular key and starts on a particular note.

When people who sang Hey Jude, they started on the same note that the recording started on.

Suggests that they memorised the pitch of the song and the tempo etc.

The pitch and tempo have been so strongly coded in the brain that when they are asked to reproduce it, they reproduce it as it was recorded.

This finding was found irrespective of musical training and ability. Suggests that most of us have a sort of pitch-finding ability that we don’t necessarily realise we have.

Question 5

What have EEG studies found in terms of listening to or imagining music?

Answer 5

Janata (1997) found that the same part of the brain is activated when we are either listening or imagining music. There is the same pattern of EEG activity.

Suggests that the memory traces that we have for the music that we like and are familiar with are being activated/re-activated when we listen to the music.

The music is being perfectly preserved in long-term memory.

Question 6

What does the term ‘earworms’ refer to?

Answer 6

Involuntary musical imagery

Get a song stuck in our head that we cannot get rid of.

Question 7

What type of tunes do earworms tend to be?

Answer 7

Simple tunes

Melodic contours

Popular tones

Chorus/verse/particular section/chunk

Question 8

How long do earworms tend to be?

Answer 8

15/30 second fragments of a song

Question 9

What disorder are earworms more common in?

Answer 9

OCD

Question 10

What makes music enjoyable for us?

Answer 10

Violates our expectations - music becomes more interesting once our expectations are not fulfilled

Question 11

How can music violate expectations?

Answer 11

Use unusual chord changes

Breaks in rhythm

Change in timbre

Question 12

What is a deceptive cadence?

Answer 12

A dominant chord followed by an unexpected chord

Question 13

Is it possible to have too much expectancy violation?

Answer 13

Yes - Shoenberg.

The more expectancy violations you have, the more uncomfortable the listening experience becomes.

Difficult for audiences to understand and appreciate atonal music (e.g., Mozart, Beethoven, Handel)

Question 14

Who is notorious for producing atonal music?

Answer 14

Schoenberg (German composer)

Question 15

What are aspects of Schoenberg’s music?

Answer 15

Atonal

No key structure

Little repetition of passages etc.

Hard to memorise

Few expectancies set up

Question 16

Why might someone like Schoenberg’s music?

Answer 16

Enjoy the different textures

Hear something new every time you listen to Schoenberg

Question 17

Why might some people not like Schoenberg’s music?

Answer 17

You can’t really anticipate anything because there is something different going on every minute of the music.

It can be difficult to understand, appreciate, and get to know the music.

Question 18

Do humans prefer tonal or atonal music?

Answer 18

Tonal music (McDermott & Hauser, 2007)

Question 19

Do humans discriminate between tonal or atonal music?

Answer 19

Yes

Question 20

Do animals discriminate between tonal or atonal music?

Answer 20

No

Question 21

What type of music do Tamarin monkeys prefer? (McDermott & Hauser, 2007)

Answer 21

Silence - this suggests that the appreciation of music is fundamentally human

Question 22

What did Levitin propose about music’s purpose in life?

Answer 22

We can identify an evolutionary function for music, but it is not necessarily the most obvious function (e.g., dancing or musical performance might play a role in mate selection or social bonding)

Question 23

Psychologically, how could music tap into biological or cognitive processes?

Answer 23

Different components make it meaningful.

Rhythm (engages our muscular system), organisation (engages our cognitive system, we like patterns/predicability), cultural capital (in a social sense - cultural knowledge - something to share with people)

Question 24

From a social point of view, what is the point of music?

Answer 24

Music just serves as an accompaniment for some activites.

Could serve a mental health function (makes us feel better, acts as an emotion regulator, affects mood)

Music could enhance social encounters (e.g., going clubbing)

Could enhance ceremonial functions (political demonstrations, the use of military bands or music in weddings)

Question 25

What is a limitation of using evolutionary explanations to understand why we like music?

Answer 25

Evolutionary explanations might be too limited to help us understand human culture and the psychological appeal of music

May need to know about other fields of knowledge to help us understand the psychological appeal of music