Unit 10.2

Question 1

How well do we remember music from other cultures?

Answer 1

• unfamiliar music can sound unstructured (harder to identify)
• can even occur in own culture (ie. pop music all sounds the same)
• distinctiveness: important for memory (not found when listening to other cultures music)

Question 2

Can we tell which emotion is being portrayed?

Answer 2

Balkwill &Thompson (1999):
- played Hindustani ragas to Western listeners
- rated ragas on degree they expressed joy, sadness, anger, and peace
- strong positive correlations for joy, sadness, and anger

Balkwill, Thompson, and Matsunaga (2004)
- Japanese listeners recognized emotions from Japanese, western, and hindustani music (joy, anger, happiness)
- relied on musical dimension such as tempo, loudness, and complexity

Question 3

How musical are animals?

Answer 3

• studying animals provide evidence for universals
• may consider music-like traits shared with animals to be core universal musical characteristics
• most animals aren’t musical

Question 4

Primates

Answer 4

Do we see…
Octave equivalence: mixed evidence
- most research suggest animals experience music as a set of fixed pitch class (absolute rather than relative)
Consonant & Dissonant
- don’t have a preference

Question 5

Primate Drumming

Answer 5

Looking at beat perception
Bonobo case study - respond rhythmically to drumming. They found evidence for
- tempo flexibility
- anticipation
Most studies found the opposite of the Bonobo case study
- reacting to the beat
- chimps & rhesus monkeys

Question 6

Bird song vs. Human song

Answer 6

Key differences
1. more constrained (ie. less varied/flexible)
2. closely tied to survival needs (ie. mating/territorial)
Similarity
3. broad repertoire of auditory sequences for perception & production, ability to create novel combinations

Question 7

Analogies

Answer 7

Similarities between distant species (humans vs. bird)

Question 8

Homologies

Answer 8

Similarities from common ancestors

Question 9

Birds

Answer 9

• absolute pitch
• no evidence for octave equivalence
• pitch perception: they perceive as power spectrum (vs. humans who perceive it as fundamental frequency)

Question 10

Vocal Learning Species

Answer 10

Vocal learning tied to dancing ability
Bird videos:
- tempo matching
- total synchronization (not forced)

Question 11

Are there musical universals?

Answer 11

Maybe yes, maybe no.
Candidates:
- equivalence of pitches seperated by octave
- organization of pitch into some kind of tonal system
- presence of the octave and perfect fifth in those tonal systems
- use of some kind of stable temporal referent
- segmentation of musical sequences into smaller groups/phrases
Theoretically, universals come from general characteristics of music
Culturally specific properties have to do with more with detailed characteristics of music
Ex.pitch
- discrete pitch representation seems to be universal
- specific set of pitches varies