Music Matters | A blog on music cognition

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2010-03-12T11:46:00.001+01:00

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Are emotions in music universal?

2010-03-10T11:18:00.011+01:00

While there are plenty of theories on how music and emotion might be related (see reference below -Juslin & Västfjäll (2008)- for a overview), there is still little empirical evidence to decide on how far music and specific associated emotions - such as happiness, fear, sadness or anger - are merely a result of association and/or culturally determined, or in fact shared and a result of brain mechanisms that we all share.

Last year Current Biology published an interesting study on the recognition of three basic emotions using Western music and that of the Mafa (an ethnic group living in the mountains of Cameroon, and that are claimed never to have been exposed to Western music). Both Mafa and Western listeners listened to short Western piano pieces and Mafa flute music and had to decide which of the three faces (from the often used Ekman archive) fitted best with the perceived music.

The study could show that the basic emotions happiness, sadness and fear could be picked up (above chance level) by both listener groups from each others music.

Below a video fragment reporting on the study:

Fritz, T., Jentschke, S., Gosselin, N., Sammler, D., Peretz, I., Turner, R., Friederici, A., & Koelsch, S. (2009). Universal Recognition of Three Basic Emotions in Music Current Biology, 19 (7), 573-576 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.02.058

Juslin, P., & Västfjäll, D. (2008). Emotional responses to music: The need to consider underlying mechanisms Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31 (05) DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X08005293

What is urban in us, and what is wild?

2010-03-01T21:17:00.011+01:00

This week a video of an event that was moderated by Faith Salie and features author Jonathan Rosen; neurobiologist Erich Jarvis; scientist and noted bird researcher Irene Pepperberg; professor of comparative cognition at Cambridge University, Nicola Clayton; Head of the Laboratory of Animal Behavior at CUNY, Ofer Tchernichovski; and David Rothenberg, professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

This event took place on June 13, 2009 in the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University. This is the first of eleven segments (See YouTube).

Meer weten over muziekcognitie? [Dutch]

2010-02-15T10:57:00.006+01:00

• Korte reeks publiekscolleges georganiseerd door de Universiteit van Amsterdam. Zie hier voor meer informatie.

• Publieksboek over muziekcognitie: www.iedereenismuzikaal.nl en gerelateerde facebook groep.

Whats new in music cognition?

2010-02-12T16:53:00.018+01:00

New Course on Music Cognition, elective of the Research Master Brain and Cognitive Sciences; See here for more information.

Crying of newborn babies: A sign of inborn musical skill?

2010-02-02T14:08:00.000+01:00

Even the crying of newborn babies seems to be more musical than we think. This can be concluded from an interesting study that was published last month in Current Biology. German researchers were able to show that newborns don’t just cry randomly, but - when studying the audio signal of their crying - one can distinguish between French and German babies. The German babies - only three days old - cry in a downward fashion, their French contemporaries showed an increasing swelling of the cry and stop abruptly.

Sound example: German & French baby cries.

How can we explain these differences? Babies do hear about three months before they are born. And the few prenatal studies that are available show that babies, in that stage of their development, already perceive and remember sounds. For instance, they recognize the sound of their mothers voice just after birth, and they can distinguish between tunes that they heard during pregnancy from those that they have never been exposed to before.

The correlation between the mother language of the babies and their average crying pattern, suggests that exposure to the language spoken by their caregivers (mother, father, etc.) influences the crying, since French language, on average, consists of raising melodies, and German intonation often shows a decreasing shape. The researchers suggest that this as a sign of a sensitivity to language from very early on in life.

My interpretation would be different. I would not so much relate these results to language, as well as a sign of a high sensitivity to the musical aspects of speech: rhythm, melody, stress (i.e. prosody). As quite some studies have shown (e.g., authors like Fernald, Trehub, Trainor, and others), infants and young children are extremely sensitive to these 'musical' variations in their environment. For example, infants seem to be highly sensitive for the musical and emotional aspects of infant-directed speech (IDS), more so than the actual linguistic structure, let alone semantics. I would therefore claim the results of the baby-study are actual evidence for very early signs of musical sensitivity to intonation and other musical aspects of sound, than that it should be seen as evidence for the start of learning a language.

P.S. I describe this argument in length in my new book Iedereen is muzikaal (Only available in Dutch).

Mampe, B., Friederici, A., Christophe, A., & Wermke, K. (2009). Newborns' Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.09.064

Case of plain plagiarism?

2010-01-26T10:20:00.013+01:00

The covers of Olivier Sacks’ Musicophilia and my recent book Iedereen is muzikaal look quite similar. A case of plain plagiarism?

Blogger Harold Schellinx figured it out:

" [..] The covers of these two books, each of which in its own way deals with 'music and the brain', are basically the same (notwithstanding the fact that the one is a portrait of Oliver Sacks, and the other not-a-portrait of Henkjan Honing :-) Both prominently show a listener enjoying music played back through a set of headphones. Both listeners have put their right hand upon the very spot where the sounds originate. This is a common gesture, often made in an attempt to shield off possible 'alien' sounds coming in from the 'outside' and get even more 'inside' the music. And both listeners wear a very private smile: their eyes are closed, thus telling us that whatever is going on, it is going on inside their heads. The pictures show their retreat from all that is space, and thus quite forcefully underline that musical hearing (contrary to the hearing of a mere succession of acoustical events, that I like to call factual) is "the manifestation of time eventuating" (as Viktor Zuckerkandl nicely put it in his 1956 Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World.) [..]" HarS Soundblog (2010)

(See also: een kijkje in de keuken [Dutch])

Is beat induction special? (Part 7)

2010-01-04T19:05:00.010+01:00

A recording of a lecture by dr Ani Patel from the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego, including an exposé on why beat induction (and/or synchronizing to a beat) might be special to 'musical animals':

Patel, A., Iversen, J., Bregman, M., & Schulz, I. (2009). Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038

Is iedereen muzikaal? [Dutch]

2010-01-03T17:37:00.007+01:00

Voor het volledige interview zie hier.

Y've got the music in ya?

2010-01-01T15:24:00.005+01:00

Today - as start of the new year - a link to a review by Harold Schellinx of Iedereen is muzikaal, to give you a flavour of the book.

N.B. Schellinx was a fellow student from the then Utrecht based Institute of Sonology and is now an independent media-artist and -theorist, living and working in Paris, Amsterdam and elsewhere.

Let it be a surprising new year!

Nur eine Minderheit für Schönberg, Stockhausen und Cage? [German]

2009-12-31T16:22:00.007+01:00

"Neue Musik ist anstrengend. Neuro- und Musikwissenschaftler erforschen, warum die Klänge von Schönberg, Stockhausen und Cage nur eine Minderheit begeistern."

See recent discussion in Die Zeit.

Does natural selection play a role in cultural change?

2009-12-17T12:09:00.006+01:00

Natural selection expresses the idea that organisms (i.e. their genes) vary and that variability has consequences. Some variants are unfit and go extinct, others adapt and do well. This process, repeated over millions of years, has given us the variety of life on earth.

Many authors have played with the idea how to combine these insights from evolutionary biology to changes in culture, the notion of ‘memes’ being one of them. Richard Dawkins proposed that human culture is composed of a multitude of particulate units, memes, which are analogous to the genes of biological transmission. These cultural replicators are transmitted by imitation between members of a community and are subject to mutational-evolutionary pressures over time.

Recently researchers at Imperial College London started yet another attempt to try to show if, and how, natural selection might play a role in music. They are currently running an online experiment hoping to find support for this idea:

The online test can be found here.

Are auditory representations a result of temporal predictions?

2009-11-27T21:44:00.010+01:00

Last month an interesting review was published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences arguing that ‘predictive representations of temporal regularities constitute the core of auditory objects in the brain.’ A possible consequence of this argument is that auditory sensory memory and (temporal) predictions are simply two sides of the same coin.

The authors (among which István Winkler and Sue Denham that collaborated with our Amsterdam group in the EmCAP project; see earlier blogs), review much of the recent literature using brain imaging and electrophysiological techniques. They support their hypothesis on the basis of at least five observations (and I paraphrase the authors here):

First, auditory regularity representations are temporally persistent; they have been shown to connect sounds separated by up to circa 10 seconds and persist for at least 30 seconds.

Second, auditory regularity representations encode all sound features with a resolution comparable to perception, since perceptually discriminable deviations elicit a Mismatch Negativity (MMN).

Third, when two sound streams are perceptually separated, MMN reflects the perceived sound organization, its elicitation dynamically follows perceptual fluctuations between two alternative sound organizations and the effects of priming sequences on perception.

Fourth, regularities are extracted from acoustically widely different exemplars in a sequence, including the natural variation of environmental sounds.

And finally, violations of predictive rules have been shown to elicit the MMN. For example, delivering a low tone after a short one elicited the MMN, when for most tones the rule “short tones are followed by high-pitched tones, long tones by low-pitched tones” held.

Interestingly, violations in the form of silence (i.e. no sound) - such as omissions in a natural drum-pattern - also show a MMN. And in addition, these effects are also found when attention is directed to other aspects than the sound /music or when participants are unattentive (such as in the case with sleeping neonates).

Winkler, I., Denham, S., & Nelken, I. (2009). Modeling the auditory scene: predictive regularity representations and perceptual objects Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13 (12), 532-540 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2009.09.003

Will empirical method and the humanities ever meet?

2009-11-26T20:18:00.019+01:00

A short post, simply because I like this drawing by Mariet Numan. In a way it summarizes the state of empirical method in the humanities... ("It does not rain")

(See also discussion on Facebook)

Wederom de oppervlakkige luisteraar? [Dutch]

2009-11-26T15:46:00.014+01:00

Bas van Puttens opiniestuk in NRC Handelsblad (‘Red de cultuur uit de handen van de toptokkies’) is een tragisch voorbeeld van het wij-zij denken in onze cultuur. Dat wij mensen dat klaarblijkelijk aantrekkelijk vinden, tot daaraan toe. Maar begrippen als 'toptokkies' afzetten tegen 'gestudeerde mensen' is nergens voor nodig.

In eerste instantie dacht ik: wat een aardig vormgegeven journalistiek stuk dat de toon van de (populaire) media overneemt om een punt te maken, zoals 'drempelverlagers', 'doelgroepverbreders', 'de populistentrein' of ‘elitetokkies’. Maar even daarna gaat deze toon over in zinssnedes als 'hoogopgeleide autochtone muziekliefhebbers' (HAMs) en heimwee naar de tijd waarin de je 'de amateur een doodschop [kon] geven'.

Dat was het moment waarop ik me, in eerste instantie, te vervreemd achtte om te reageren. Maar in tweede instantie besloot ik om dit juist te doen. Deze schrijver, in zijn naïeve boosheid, spreekt een sentiment aan waar ik, als aangewezen deel van de genoemde (doel)groep van HAMs, niet in mee wens te gaan. Over populisme gesproken...

Toch begrijp ik van Puttens lobby voor een kwaliteitszender voor klassieke muziek; een programmering waar niet zomaar Bach, Beethoven of Boulez wordt ‘gedraaid’, maar juist een zorgvuldig uitgekozen en soms zelfs aangeprezen uitvoering. Daar sta ik helemaal achter. Maar zelfs voor HAMs zou het advies in het luisteren moeten zijn: niet minder, maar meer. En vooral gevarieerder én diverser.

P.S. De veelzeggende illustratie is van Cyprian Koscielniak.

P.S. 2 Discussie op Internet samengevat in het NRC van 2 december 2009:

Is there a difference between listening and hearing?

2009-11-04T17:13:00.005+01:00

Deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie illustrates how listening to music involves much more than simply letting sound waves hit your eardrums...

Zijn we oppervlakkige luisteraars geworden? [Dutch]

2009-11-01T17:53:00.009+01:00

Een veelgehoorde cultuurkritiek is dat mensen "de tijd niet meer nemen om werkelijk te luisteren". Dat is even waar als onwaar. Veel van de informatie die we dagelijks tot ons nemen is visuele informatie. Maar luisteren doen we overal. We kijken naar de film en worden omgeven door geluid. We staan in de file en luisteren naar de radio of naar degene die ons belt. We gaan op vakantie en nemen een audioboek mee. We stappen op de trein en zetten onze iPod aan, of luisteren mee naar de gesprekken van onze mede-reizigers. We gebruiken auditieve media terwijl we tegelijkertijd iets anders doen. Maar impliceert dit dat we niet goed luisteren? Wat betekent het nieuwe luistergedrag voor ons dagelijks leven? En hoe is het ontstaan — welke technologische en culturele veranderingen hebben ons luisterleven veranderd?

Symposium Het nieuwe luisterleven.

Organisatie: Ned. Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid en Univ. Maastricht

Lokatie: Ned. Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid, Hilversum

Datum: vrijdag 20 november 2009

Do we all have a talent for music?

2009-10-22T23:48:00.034+02:00

A simple 'yes' is the short answer, I believe. I do an attempt to explain this in a book that is about to be published in Dutch (English, and other languages are planned for 2010/11). The evidence comes from researchers from all over the globe. Standing on the shoulders of giants... it turned out to be a great view...

See more on Facebook.

H. Honing (2009). Iedereen is muzikaal: Wat we weten over het luisteren naar muziek. Nieuw Amsterdam Uitgevers. ISBN: 978 90 468 0598 5 www.iedereenismuzikaal.nl

Wat is het belang van muziek? [Dutch]

2009-10-12T15:00:00.007+02:00

De Stelling van...Henkjan Honing, vanmiddag te verdedigen op SPUI25, luidt: ‘We zijn allemaal muzikale dieren'.

Over muzikaliteit bestaan veel misverstanden. Mensen die zichzelf amuzikaal vinden, zeggen dat ze geen ritmegevoel hebben of niet zuiver kunnen zingen. Een zingende vogel of een op de maat dansende kaketoe vinden ze echter al snel ‘muzikaal'. Maar kunnen dieren wel muzikaal zijn en wat is muzikaliteit eigenlijk?

"Of een diersoort in staat is om muziek te maken en te ervaren, kun je pas beoordelen als je een definitie van muziek hebt. Maar er zijn nogal wat definities mogelijk: van muziek als geordend geluid tot alles wat je ‘als muziek in de oren klinkt'. Honing stelt dat muziek in feite alles is waarvan wij vinden dat het muziek is, of beter: alles waar wij muziek in horen (music is in the mind of the beholder). Terwijl vogelzang door ons al snel als muziek wordt gehoord, wil dat nog niet zeggen dat het voor vogels ook muziek is. Hetzelfde geldt voor walvissen, dolfijnen en andere dieren die geluid maken dat we graag als muziek betitelen. En daarmee is de grens van wat wel en geen muziek is, wel heel flexibel geworden, betoogt Honing. Het lijkt zinvoller om een onderscheid te maken tussen de begrippen muzikaliteit en muziek. Muzikaliteit als een natuurlijke, op onze biologie gebaseerde eigenschap, en muziek als een cultureel bepaald fenomeen op basis van die biologie. Zonder muzikaliteit geen muziek."

Do you have musical expectations?

2009-09-30T14:06:00.004+02:00

Jazzsinger Bobby McFerrin demonstrates 'musical expectations' at the World Science Festival:

More fragments can be found here.

Do we have a music instinct?

2009-09-22T13:59:00.009+02:00

Another short entry to refer you to an interesting initiative of the North-American tv station PBS on music and science. See their website.

Is beat induction special? (Part 6)

2009-09-19T08:00:00.000+02:00

This week a brief update consisting of a short interview with Ani Patel (Senior Fellow at the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego, US) at a conference workshop at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) talking about Snowball: the dancing cockatoo that gracefully helped boosting the visibility of research in the neuroscience and cognition of music.

See earlier entries on beat induction.

Honing, H., Ladinig, O., Háden, G., & Winkler, I. (2009). Is Beat Induction Innate or Learned? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1169 (1), 93-96 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04761.x

Patel, A., Iversen, J., Bregman, M., & Schulz, I. (2009). Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038

New evidence for the Mozart effect?

2009-09-15T21:46:00.008+02:00

Last week an interesting study was published (online) that provides evidence that music exposure facilitates neuroplasticity in rats. While I feel quite uncomfortable with using animals for these studies (especially if you read the explicit method sections of these kind of neurobiological papers :-\) , the results could well contribute to a better insight in how music might be functional in the neurohabilitation of humans.

About sixty rats were divided in four groups, two of which had callosotomy performed on them: a small section of the brain was removed just after they were born, an area that is considered important for e.g. spatial memory. The research elaborates on earlier studies that showed music to have an effect on hippocampal neurogenesis, as well as facilitated spatial memory (e.g., Kim et al., 2006).

The authors conclude that an enriched sound environment -exposing rats to piano music- helps the recovery from neural damage. Rats with a damaged brain showed signs of recovery after about fifty days of listening to Mozart piano sonates for about 12 hours a day. Compared to rats that also had brain damage, but that did not listen to music, they performed significantly better in a spatial memory task (finding their way in a maze) and in their emotional reactivity (using a marble burying task).

While it remains unclear whether sounds other than music would have the same effect, the study is a striking example of research showing that music has a larger role in shaping the brain than previously thought.

Amagdei, A., Balteş, F., Avram, J., & Miu, A. (2009). Perinatal exposure to music protects spatial memory against callosal lesions International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience DOI: 10.1016/j.ijdevneu.2009.08.017

Why does a melody stick in your mind? (Part 2)

2009-09-11T10:13:00.010+02:00

Studying earworms (or ‘brainworms’ as Oliver Sacks names them) is a topic that would make an ideal PhD thesis: it is a striking, yet unexplained phenomenon, and a research question that is around for quite a while, and (embarrassingly for music cognition) without a sufficient answer. One of the reasons might be - comparable to studying déjà vu’s - that to think of an experiment that can capture the phenomenon when it occurs, is quite a challenge. And, as far as I am aware, no explanation has appeared, as yet, in the scientific journals.

Nevertheless, there is something to say about the structural aspects of the melodies that tend to function as earworms. Most sticky songs are relative simple in terms of their harmonic structure, but have a striking moment - the hook of the song. It is the point in the music where something catchy happens. It is precisely the moment where you would start singing a song from memory (see more at [1]). That said: this is just an after-the-fact interpretation, not a explanation.

P.S. Interested in earworms? Follow the discussion at Facebook.

[1] Dutch tv item (with subtitles) on the earworm.

Wat is het belang van muziek? [Dutch]

2009-09-09T18:19:00.015+02:00

In de afgelopen weken ontving ik deze reactie van een collega op een onderzoeksvoorstel:

“[..] wat dat betreft staat Pinker's argument nog steeds overeind: als er vanaf morgen geen muziek meer is, dan gaat het leven van mensen gewoon door; mocht er bijvoorbeeld geen taal meer zijn, dan staat ons leven op z'n kop, en zal overleven/reproductie een stuk lastiger zijn.”

Ik zal deze positie gebruiken als strawman (want de kritiek was goed bedoeld, ter voorbereiding op nog scherpere kritiek) voor een lezing/debat dat gepland staat voor 12 oktober a.s. in Spui25: "De stelling van..". Ik zal daar proberen de onmogelijke, en tegelijkertijd - althans in mijn ogen - belangrijke positie verdedigen van het belang van muziek: Music Matters, de titel van deze blog.

Mocht je voorstellen voor munitie hebben :-) .. reageer gerust... meer op Facebook.