Music Matters | A blog on music cognition

Is a silence always a silence?

2012-01-23T05:04:00.000+01:00

Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis of the University of Arkansas discusses in a spoken column at Inside Higher Ed why musical silence is just as important to a composition as the notes themselves:

The last sentence of the column is "If music moves you, the next time someone asks if you know anything about it, think twice before you say 'no' ". Couldn't agree more.

A case of beat deafness?

2011-12-20T23:05:00.000+01:00

Below the full episode of the Dutch Labyrint Tv program on Music and Neuroscience broadcasted on 14 December 2011. Unfortunately no English subtitles, but parts of it are English spoken.

Meer weten over maatdoofheid? [Dutch]

2011-12-15T01:15:00.000+01:00

Mathieu: de man zonder ritme.

Olaf Oudheusden (de regisseur van ‘De man zonder ritme’) en een heel team van enthousiaste programmamakers, waaronder Wiesje Kuijpers en Eef Grob, stopten enorm veel energie in de aflevering van Labyrint over muziek en onze hersenen die gisteravond werd uitgezonden op Nederland 2. Je ziet het er, mijns inziens, aan af: zie de volledige aflevering op www.labyrint.nl. Voor een verslag van de online napraatsessie zie www.labyrint.nl.

Veel materiaal sneuvelt natuurlijk in de montage. Daarom hieronder een stukje uit de teleconferentie van een maand of wat geleden, tussen het CSCA in Amsterdam en BRAMS in Montréal, dat een aanvullend inzicht geeft in het ontbreken van maatgevoel bij Mathieu:

A case of congenital beat deafness? [Part 2]

2011-12-11T01:00:00.000+01:00

Isabelle Peretz, Co-director of the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS), told me about Mathieu during a workshop at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in November 2009. She was very excited, and I couldn’t but share her enthusiasm: She was pretty sure she found a beat-deaf person.

'Mathieu was discovered through a recruitment of subjects who felt they could not keep the beat in music, such as in clapping in time at a concert or dancing in a club. Mathieu was the only clear-cut case among volunteers who reported these problems. Despite a lifelong love of music and dancing, and musical training including lessons over several years in various instruments, voice, dance and choreography, Mathieu complained that he was unable to find the beat in music. Participation in music and dance activities, while pleasurable, had been difficult for him.' (from Phillips-Silver et al., 2011)

About one year later her group published a journal paper presenting some behavioral evidence that Mathieu was a case of congenital beat deafness.

The questions posted in a blog entry just after the publication of that study resulted in a collaboration in which next to behavioral also direct electrophysiological methods were used. Pascale Lidji (also associated with BRAMS) did an EEG/ERP experiment, modeled after our earlier Amsterdam experiments, to directly probe Mathieu’s apparent beat-deafness.

Last week we had a teleconference discussing the first experimental results (filmed by a Dutch TV crew following our work). These suggest that Mathieu’s brain did pick-up the beat, but his conscious perception did not, as several behavioral experiments confirmed. Intriguing, to say the least.

See below for some fragments from the teleconference:

And the trailer announcing the tv program to be broadcasted next week:

For more information, see the Labyrint tv website.

N.B. There will be a live broadcasted napraatsessie that can be viewed at www.labyrint.nl.

Phillips-Silver, J., Toiviainen, P., Gosselin, N., Piché, O., Nozaradan, S., Palmer, C., & Peretz, I. (2011). Born to dance but beat deaf: A new form of congenital amusia Neuropsychologia DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.02.002

Is muzikaliteit aangeboren of aangeleerd? [Dutch]

2011-12-10T10:08:00.001+01:00

In de NTR-serie Pavlov stellen acht bekende Nederlanders een vraag aan de wetenschap. In deze uitzending test Fleur Bouwer (UvA) de muzikaliteit van Lavinia Meijer.

Zelf ook de luistertest doen? Hij duurt ongeveer twintig minuten. Klik hier.

Voor de volledige uitzending zie de website van Pavlov.

Which brain areas are involved in listening?

2011-12-06T10:05:00.001+01:00

It's a persistent myth to think that music is processed solely in the right hemisphere. This week yet another study shows that, even when the processes are restricted to listening alone, virtually the whole brain is involved.

A Finish research group led by Petri Toiviainen found that music listening recruits not only the auditory areas of the brain, but also employs large-scale neural networks. They could show that the processing of musical pulse recruits motor areas in the brain, supporting the idea that music and movement are closely intertwined. Limbic areas of the brain, known to be associated with emotions, were found to be involved in rhythm and tonality processing. Processing of timbre was associated with activations in the so-called default mode network, which is assumed to be associated with mind-wandering and creativity.

Adapted from Stewart et al. (2009) Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology.

As said, this study is not alone in this. In a recent chapter Laurel Stewart and colleagues made a similar claim based on a review of a vast amount of literature. In the figure above (redrawn from the original) the circles indicate the areas where more than 50% of the existing literature agrees that they are involved. (N.B. it is good to realize these areas are actually part of whole networks, and not just single locations.) And here again, if you look at the brain networks involved in listening, you’ll notice that virtually the whole brain is involved.

Alluri, V., Toiviainen, P., Jääskeläinen, I., Glerean, E., Sams, M., & Brattico, E. (2011). Large-scale brain networks emerge from dynamic processing of musical timbre, key and rhythm NeuroImage DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.11.019

Stewart L, von Kriegstein K, Warren JD, & Griffiths TD (2006). Music and the brain: disorders of musical listening. Brain : a journal of neurology, 129 (Pt 10), 2533-53 PMID: 16845129

Is beat induction species-specific? [Part 2]

2011-11-30T12:55:00.002+01:00

It is a slowly but steadily unfolding story, with more and more evidence in support of it: The story revealing with what other species we share beat induction, a skill that is argued to be fundamental to music.

The ability to synchronize to the beat of the music has been demonstrated in several parrot species and, apparently, one elephant species, supporting the vocal learning and rhythmic synchronization hypothesis, which posits that vocal learning provides a neurobiological foundation for auditory–motor entrainment.

While earlier experiments with parrots and related animals were criticized mainly for their relatively informal setup (e.g. using existing YouTube videos or analyzing home-made video’s), a few weeks ago an elegant and systematic study appeared in Nature Scientific Reports in which budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulates), a vocal-learning parrot species, were trained to synchronize to a metronome. A study that can be considered an important first step towards understanding the timing control mechanism in vocal learners.

Video example of budgerigar doing a tapping task (Source).

Unfortunately, they were trained only to a (visual and auditory) metronome, and not a rhythmically varying acoustic signal (read: music), so we are still not sure this is indeed a case of beat induction. And is the bird in the video not simply reacting, instead of anticipating (predicting negative phase) as humans do?

Also, to be real support for the vocal learning (or vocal mimicking) hypothesis, additional experiments are still needed. Most notably an experiment that tests whether related species that are not vocal learners, such as doves, are incapable of the learning that the budgerigars show. (I know that at least one cognitive biologist is willing to pick up the glove :-)

Hasegawa, A., Okanoya, K., Hasegawa, T., & Seki, Y. (2011). Rhythmic synchronization tapping to an audio–visual metronome in budgerigars Scientific Reports, 1 DOI: 10.1038/srep00120

TEDxAmsterdam: What makes us musical animals?

2011-11-26T02:29:00.001+01:00

Research and references mentioned in the talk can be found in the book cited below. More video reports can be found at the TEDxChannel.

Honing, H. (2011) Musical Cognition. A Science of Listening. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4128-4228-0.

Zarco, W., Merchant, H., Prado, L., & Mendez, J. (2009). Subsecond Timing in Primates: Comparison of Interval Production Between Human Subjects and Rhesus Monkeys Journal of Neurophysiology, 102 (6), 3191-3202 DOI: 10.1152/jn.00066.2009

Uitkijken naar TEDxAmsterdam? [Dutch]

2011-11-23T09:43:00.000+01:00

What is the role of consciousness in auditory perception?

2011-11-09T18:17:00.000+01:00

István Winkler

On Tuesday 15 November 2011 prof. dr István Winkler (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) will give the monthly CSCA lecture in Amsterdam. He is visiting the Music Cognition Group for two days.

Winkler will talk about his recent research in auditory perception and its role and functioning in the newborn brain. He will argue that the representation of a sound organization in the brain is a coalition of auditory regularity representations producing compatible predictions for the continuation of the sound input. Competition between alternative sound organizations relies on comparing the regularity representations on how reliably they predict incoming sounds and how much together they explain from the total variance of the acoustic input. Results obtained in perceptual studies using the auditory streaming paradigm will be interpreted in support of the hypothesis that regularity representations underlie auditory stream segregation.

Furthermore, Winkler will argue that the same regularity representations are involved in the deviance-detection process reflected by the mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related potential (ERP).

Finally, based on the hypothesized link between auditory scene analysis and deviance detection, Winkler will propose a functional model of sound organization and discuss how it can be implemented in a computational model.

For more information (time and location), see the CSCA website.

Näätänen R, Kujala T, & Winkler I (2011). Auditory processing that leads to conscious perception: a unique window to central auditory processing opened by the mismatch negativity and related responses. Psychophysiology, 48 (1), 4-22 PMID: 20880261.

Winkler I, Denham SL, & Nelken I (2009). Modeling the auditory scene: predictive regularity representations and perceptual objects. Trends in cognitive sciences, 13 (12), 532-40 PMID: 19828357

Is beat induction species-specific? [Part 1]

2011-11-02T13:06:00.001+01:00

Beat induction (BI) is the cognitive skill that allows us to hear a regular pulse in music to which we can then synchronize. Perceiving this regularity in music allows us to dance and make music together. As such it can be considered a fundamental musical trait that, arguably, played a decisive role in the origin of music (see also earlier entries of this blog). Furthermore, BI has been argued to be a spontaneously developing, domain-specific and species-specific skill.

With regard to the first aspect, recent studies with infants and newborns provide some evidence suggesting such early bias (Honing et al., 2009). With regard to the second aspect convincing evidence is still lacking, although it was recently argued that BI does not play a role (or is even avoided) in spoken language (Patel, 2008). And with regard to the latter aspect, it was recently suggested that we might share BI with a selected group of bird species (Fitch, 2009) and not with more closely related species such as nonhuman primates.(Zarco et al., 2009). This is surprising when one assumes a close mapping between specific genotypes and specific cognitive traits. However, more and more studies show that genetically distantly related species can show similar cognitive skill, and this offers a rich basis for comparative studies of this specific cognitive function.

Most animal studies have used behavioral methods to probe the presence (or absence) of BI, such as tapping tasks or measuring head bobs. It might well be that if more direct electrophysiological measures are used (such as analogs of the MMN), nonhuman primates might indeed also show BI.

Its this hypothesis that that is the topic of a new and exiting collaboration of our group with that of Hugo Merchant at the Institute of Neurobiology in Querétaro, Mexico. This week we started a series of experiments with Rhesus Macaques using the same paradigm we used in our earlier newborn studies.

Fitch, W. (2009). Biology of Music: Another One Bites the Dust Current Biology, 19 (10) DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.04.004

Honing H, Ladinig O, Háden GP, & Winkler I (2009). Is beat induction innate or learned? Probing emergent meter perception in adults and newborns using event-related brain potentials. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1169, 93-6 PMID: 19673760

Patel, A. D. (2008). Music, language, and the brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zarco, W., Merchant, H., Prado, L., & Mendez, J. (2009). Subsecond Timing in Primates: Comparison of Interval Production Between Human Subjects and Rhesus Monkeys Journal of Neurophysiology, 102 (6), 3191-3202 DOI: 10.1152/jn.00066.2009

Wie won de Creatieve Geest Prijs? [Dutch]

2011-10-28T17:04:00.001+02:00

Onderzoeker Shanti Ganesh van de Radboud Universiteit is de winnaar van de Creatieve Geest Prijs 2011, een nieuwe prijs aan de UvA geïnitieerd door de Freek & Hella de Jonge Stichting en het Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam (CSCA). Ganesh ontvangt de prijs voor haar onderzoeksvoorstel ‘Can creativity switch domains?’ Met de prijs van € 10.000 kan ze haar voorstel verder uitwerken, waarbij ze ondersteund wordt vanuit het UvA-onderzoekszwaartepunt Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Met het instellen van de Creatieve Geest Prijs willen Freek en Hella de Jonge onderzoek stimuleren naar creativiteit en de hersenactiviteiten die daarbij een rol spelen, zoals het waarnemend vermogen van schilders, het ruimtelijk inzicht van architecten en het associatieve talent van cabaretiers.

Meer informatie over de winnaar van 2011.
Meer informatie over de prijs.

Interested in human nature?

2011-10-11T10:23:00.000+02:00

During a partner meeting yesterday evening at the residence of the Amsterdam municipality, the majority of the speakers list was released for the 2011 edition of the TEDxAmsterdam event. The speakers and the audience will enter the theme ‘Human Nature’ on an expedition to find out what it means to be human in a society that is increasingly dominated by technology and economical issues.

More than ever has there been a need for a vision that is based on human virtues and those that deserve the mark of ‘practical wisdom’. Dutch speakers who are confirmed for TEDxAmsterdam 2011 are among others prof. dr Eveline Crone (Leiden University), prof. dr Henkjan Honing (University of Amsterdam), Chief of the Netherlands Defence Staff Peter Van Uhm, dr David Lentink (bird and swift flight expert), journalist Joris Luyendijk (observes bankers in the City of London). Het Nationale Ballet will perform the opening act.

For the full speaker list see here.

Crone, E., & van der Molen, M. (2004). Developmental Changes in Real Life Decision Making: Performance on a Gambling Task Previously Shown to Depend on the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Developmental Neuropsychology, 25 (3), 251-279 DOI: 10.1207/s15326942dn2503_2

Lentink, D., Müller, U., Stamhuis, E., de Kat, R., van Gestel, W., Veldhuis, L., Henningsson, P., Hedenström, A., Videler, J., & van Leeuwen, J. (2007). How swifts control their glide performance with morphing wings Nature, 446 (7139), 1082-1085 DOI: 10.1038/nature05733

A history of music cognition?

2011-10-10T13:02:00.000+02:00

One of the pioneers in the field that would come to be called music cognition was H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins (1923-2004). Not only was Longuet-Higgins one of the founders of the cognitive sciences (he coined the term in 1973), but as early as 1971 he formulated, together with Mark Steedman, the first computer model of musical perception. That early work was followed in 1976 with a full-fledged alternative in the journal Nature, seven years earlier than the more widely known, but, according to Longuet-Higgins, less precisely formulated, Generative Theory of Tonal Music of Lerdahl and Jackendoff. In a review in Nature in 1983 he wrote somewhat sourly:

‘Lerdahl and Jackendoff are, it seems, in favor of constructing a formally precise theory of music, in principle but not in practice.’

Although Lerdahl and Jackendorff’s book was far more precise than any musicological discussion found in the leading journals, the importance of formalization cannot be underestimated. Notwithstanding all our musicological knowledge, many fundamental concepts are in fact treated as axioms; musicologists are, after all, anxious to tackle far more interesting matters than basic notions like tempo, meter or syncopation, to name a few. But these axioms are not in actual fact understood, in the sense that we are not able (as yet) to formalize them sufficiently to explain them to a computer. This is still the challenge of ‘computer modelling’ (and of recent initiatives such as computational humanities) – a challenge that Longuet-Higgins was one of the first to take up [Excerpt from Honing, 2011].

Longuet-Higgins, H. C. (1983). All in theory — the analysis of music Nature, 304 (5921), 93-93 DOI: 10.1038/304093a0

Longuet-Higgins, H. C. (1976). Perception of melodies Nature, 263 (5579), 646-653 DOI: 10.1038/263646a0

Honing, H. (2011). The illiterate listener. On music cognition, musicality and methodology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Do music lessons make you smarter?

2011-09-17T16:02:00.003+02:00

As a follow-up of an earlier entry, announcing a lecture from Glenn Schellenberg at CSCA in Amsterdam, see this link for a recording of that event (UvA streaming video; Sorry, only visible for UvA-students and employees).

Cleese explains it all

2011-09-15T13:25:00.000+02:00

Zatorre R, & McGill J (2005). Music, the food of neuroscience? Nature, 434 (7031), 312-5 PMID: 15772648

Interested in doing research in cognitive and computational musicology?

2011-09-13T14:40:00.000+02:00

A postdoc and PhD position are currently vacant in two collaborative research projects that cut across the boundaries between music cognition, musicology and computer science.

For more information, see here. Deadline for applications is 14 October 2011.

(For related vacancies at the e-Laboratory, see here.)

Verslag symposium muziek en het brein [Dutch]

2011-09-06T22:03:00.006+02:00

Muziek en het Brein - 22 juni 2011 from Coolpolitics on Vimeo.

Muziek en het Brein - 22 juni 2011 from Lokaalmondiaal on Vimeo.

Voor meer opnames zie hier.

Dirk Jan Povel

2011-08-12T11:40:00.002+02:00

Today reached me the sad news that one of the Dutch pionieers in rhythm perception research, Dirk Jan Povel, has passed away after an incurable illness.

Povel made an important contribution to our understanding of the perception of rhythmic patterns reported in a number of highly cited studies. He retired from Radboud University and at the Nijmegen Institute for Information and Cognition (NICI) in November 2005. He taught a few thousand students and was deeply involved in theoretical and applied research in a number of fields. Most notably theoretical and applied research related to speech perception and speech production, the perception of temporal patterns and musical rhythms, and the production of serial motor patterns. More recently he has been doing research on the on-line processes of music perception to discover the perceptual mechanisms listeners use in coding music (see for more information here).

Povel, D. (1981). Internal representation of simple temporal patterns. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 7 (1), 3-18 DOI: 10.1037/0096-1523.7.1.3

What makes us musical animals? [Part 2]

2011-08-09T19:09:00.005+02:00

This week a new essay came out in which I try to make a case for ‘illiterate listening’, the human ability to discern, interpret and appreciate musical nuances. We have known for some time that babies possess a keen perceptual sensitivity for the melodic, rhythmic and dynamic aspects of speech and music: aspects that linguists are inclined to categorize under the term ‘prosody’, but which are in fact the building blocks of music. Only much later in a child’s development does s/he make use of this ‘musical prosody’, for instance in delineating and subsequently recognizing word boundaries. We all share these musical skills, from day one, and long before a single word has been uttered, let alone conceived. It is the preverbal and preliterate stage of our development that is dominated by musical listening.

The Illiterate listener is available online since August 9, 2011.

Honing, H. (2011). The illiterate listener. On music cognition, musicality and methodology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

What makes us musical animals?

2011-07-31T15:05:00.002+02:00

This week a plug for my new book that just came out: Musical Cognition: A Science of Listening (Read fragments of it online at Google Books; currently available with more than 30% discount on the hardcover at Amazon and Barnes & Noble).

From the cover:

"Musical Cognition suggests that music is a game (or 'benificial play'). In music, our cognitive functions such as perception, memory, attention, and expectation are challenged; yet as listeners we often do not realize that the listener plays an active role in reaching the awareness that makes music so exhilarating, soothing, and inspiring. In reality, the author contends, listening does not happen in the outer world of audible sound but in the inner world of our minds and brains.

Recent research in the areas of psychology and neuro-cognition allows Honing to be explicit in a way that many of his predecessors could not. His lucid, evocative writing style guides the reader through what is known about listening to music while avoiding jargon and technical diagrams. With clear examples, the book concentrates on underappreciated musical skills — “sense of rhythm” and “relative pitch” — skills that make us musical creatures. Research on how living creatures respond to music supports the conviction that all humans have a unique, instinctive attraction to music.

Musical Cognition includes a selection of intriguing examples from recent literature exploring the role that an implicit or explicit knowledge of music plays when one listens to it. The scope of the topics discussed ranges from the ability of newborns to perceive the beat, to the unexpected musical expertise of ordinary listeners. The evidence shows that music is second nature to most human beings — biologically and socially."

Honing, H. (2011) Musical Cognition. A Science of Listening. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4128-4228-0.

Winkler, I., Haden, G., Ladinig, O., Sziller, I., & Honing, H. (2009). Newborn infants detect the beat in music Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (7), 2468-2471 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0809035106

Why would anyone listen to sad music?

2011-07-27T01:06:00.012+02:00

See also the San Francisco Classical Voice.

Huron, D. (2011). Why is sad music pleasurable? A possible role for prolactin Musicae Scientiae, 15 (2), 146-158 DOI: 10.1177/1029864911401171

Are we ‘illiterate listeners’? [Part 2]

2011-06-21T22:29:00.003+02:00

This week a fragment from The Illiterate Listener that will be published later this year at Amsterdam University Press:

"French babies cry differently than German babies. That was the conclusion of a study published at the end of 2009 in the scientific journal Current Biology. German babies were found to cry with a descending pitch; French babies, on the other hand, with an ascending pitch, descending slightly only at the end. It was a surprising observation, particularly in light of the currently accepted theory that when one cries, the pitch contour will always descend, as a physiological consequence of the rapidly decreasing pressure during the production of sound. Apparently, babies only a few days old can influence not only the dynamics, but also the pitch contour of their crying. Why would they do this?

The researchers interpreted it as the first steps in the development of language: in spoken French, the average intonation contour is ascending, while in German it is just the opposite. This, combined with the fact that human hearing is already functional during the last trimester of pregnancy, led the researchers to conclude that these babies absorbed the intonation patterns of the spoken language in their environment in the last months of pregnancy and consequently imitated it when they cried.

This observation was also surprising because until now one generally assumed that infants only develop an awareness for their mother tongue between six and eighteen months, and imitate it in their babbling. Could this indeed be unique evidence, as the researchers emphasized, that language sensitivity is already present at a very early stage? Or are other interpretations possible?

Although the facts are clear, this interpretation is a typical example of what one could call a language bias: the linguist’s understandable enthusiasm to interpret many of nature’s phenomena as linguistic. There is, however, much more to be said for the notion that these newborn babies exhibit an aptitude whose origins are found not in language but in music.

We have known for some time that babies possess a keen perceptual sensitivity for the melodic, rhythmic and dynamic aspects of speech and music: aspects that linguists are inclined to categorize under the term ‘prosody’, but which are in fact the building blocks of music. Only much later in a child’s development does he make use of this ‘musical prosody’, for instance in delineating and subsequently recognizing word boundaries. But let me emphasize that these very early indications of musical aptitude are not in essence linguistic."

Honing, H. (2011, in press). The illiterate listener. On music cognition, musicality and methodology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Is blogging outdated?

2011-06-19T22:46:00.008+02:00

Yesterday an article by Carola Houtekamer appeared in NRC Handelsblad reviewing the state of blogging. She wrote an enthusiastic article a few years ago and it was about time for a re-evaluation.

A round of telephone calls made her realize, though, that blogging is out of date and is replaced by recent activities like Twitter and Facebook. But except in the world of science! There, apparently, the 140 characters are too few, and is Facebook considered too shallow.

The most remarkable revitalization of blog-activity, mentioned in Houtekamer's article, is the new network setup by Bora Zivkovic of Scientific American. But also The Guardian, Wired and the scientific journal PLOS recently started new blog networks (see, e.g., researchblogging.org, blogs.discovermagazine.com, scientopia.org or occamstypewriter.org).

Personally, I like the scale of a blog. Over time it builds up as an archive of smaller and larger ideas, and turns out to be a reference to topics that appear with a certain regularity in my classes; it is not uncommon that some blog entries turn out to be useful as a staring point for a larger project.

Nevertheless, lets see how all this develops in the next five years. New technology will surely suggest novel ways of doing and disseminating the doubts, failures and insights of science.

Is muzikaliteit bijzonder? [Dutch]

2011-06-18T16:12:00.004+02:00

Vandaag in de Volkskrant (in de rubriek Opinie & Debat) een stuk van Dick Swaab, Erik Scherder en ondergetekende met de titel Amuzikaal zijn is de grote uitzondering: over waarom muziek geen luxe is.

Doe mee aan de discussie op opinie.volkskrant.nl.

Interested in doing a postdoc in music cognition?

2011-06-07T15:01:00.012+02:00

The University of Amsterdam offers three new postdoc positions, one of which is in the field of music cognition.

Detailed information on the project, and instructions on how to apply, can be found here. Deadline for applications: 23 June 2011.

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

Is muziek een luxe? [Dutch]

2011-06-02T19:19:00.006+02:00

Op woensdag 22 juni organiseert Muziek telt! het symposium Muziek en het Brein. Vragen als: wat zijn die positieve effecten van muziek op het brein? Wanneer vinden ze plaats? En hoe ver zijn wetenschappers in hun onderzoek hiernaar? worden beantwoord door de keynote speakers:

prof. dr. Erik Scherder (hoogleraar Klinische Neuropsychologie)
prof. dr. Henkjan Honing (hoogleraar Muziekcognitie)
prof. dr. Dick Swaab (hoogleraar neurobiologie)

Het symposium is bedoeld voor iedereen die werkzaam is in onderwijs, wetenschap, politiek, gezondheidszorg en muziek.

Presentatie van de middag is in handen van Paul Witteman.

Om aan te melden klik hier (mogelijk tot 31 mei a.s.).

Een creatieve geest? [Dutch]

2011-05-26T09:56:00.015+02:00

Op initiatief van de Freek & Hella de Jonge stichting en het Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam (CSCA) is de Creatieve Geest Prijs opgericht. Deze prijs wordt toegekend aan een jonge gepromoveerde wetenschapper die met een origineel en sprankelend idee komt om eigen onderzoek uit te voeren, waarin creativiteit en de werking van de hersenen centraal staan. De prijswinnaar krijgt de kans om in het kader van het UvA Brain & Cognition programma haar/zijn onderzoeksplan te realiseren en zich zo als veelbelovend onderzoeker te profileren.

Met de prijs wordt meer aandacht gevraagd voor onderzoek naar creativiteit en de hersenprocessen die daarbij een rol spelen, zoals de waarneming van schilders, het ontwerpen door architecten of het associatief vermogen van cabaretiers. Dit onderzoek kan plaatsvinden vanuit meerdere wetenschappelijke disciplines, zolang het thema ‘hersenen en cognitie’ centraal staat. Het voornaamste beoordelingscriterium is dat het gaat om een nieuw, onverwacht idee over hoe het brein creativiteit stuurt, gekoppeld aan een plan hoe dit verder te onderzoeken.

De deadline voor aanvragen is 15 augustus 2011.

Meer informatie is hier te vinden.

Does music make you smarter?

2011-05-18T16:34:00.010+02:00

Since the publication of Music and spatial task performance in Nature in 1993, numerous researchers have tried to replicate the so-called ‘Mozart effect’: the idea that listening to Mozart's music would make you smarter.

There is now quite some evidence indicating that indeed music listening leads to enhanced performance on a variety of cognitive tests, but also that such effects are short-term and stem from the impact of music on arousal level and mood, which, in turn, affect cognitive performance. However, this is not special to music: experiences other than music listening have similar effects.

However, music lessons in childhood tell a different story. They are associated with small but general and long-lasting intellectual benefits that cannot be attributed to obvious confounding variables such as family income and parents' education (Schellenberg, 2004). However, the mechanisms underlying this association have yet to be determined (Schellenberg & Peretz, 2008). Other controversial issues related to these findings are, for example, the direction of causation -does music influence cognitive skills or is it the other way around?- and the reason why "real musicians" often fail to exhibit enhanced performance on measures of intelligence -if music makes you smarter why aren't musicians generally smarter?

On Wednesday 15 June 2011 Glenn Schellenberg will give a lecture on this topic at the Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam (CSCA) of the University of Amsterdam. See here for more information on the lecture and location.

Schellenberg, E. G., & Peretz, I. (2008). Music, language and cognition: unresolved issues. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12 (2), 45-46 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2007.11.005

A 2006 live recording of Glenn Gould?

2011-04-20T12:30:00.003+02:00

[Repeated entry from 17 August 2007] Sony Music recently released a new recording (made in 2006) of Glenn Gould performing the Goldberg Variations. Curious, not? The recording was made using measurements of the old recordings and then regenerating the performance on a computer-controlled grand piano, a modern pianola.

This technology dates from the early nineties, a time when several piano companies (including Yamaha and Bösendorfer) combined MIDI and modern solenoid technology with the older idea of a pianola. Old paper piano rolls with recordings of Rachmaninoff, Bartok, Stravinsky and others were translated to MIDI and could be reproduced ‘live’ on modern instruments like the Yamaha Disklavier. Until now, the only left challenge was to be able to do this for recordings of which no piano-rolls were available.

Besides the technicalities of all this, for most people the real surprise —or perhaps disillusion— might well be the realization that a piano performance can be reduced to the ‘when’, ‘what’ and ‘how fast’ the piano keys are pressed. Three numbers per note can fully capture a piano performance, and it allows for replicating any performance on a grand piano(-la). The moment a pianist hits the key with a certain velocity, the hammer releases, and any gesture that is made after that can be considered merely dramatic: it will have no effect on the sound. This realization puts all theories about the magic of touché in a different perspective.

Nevertheless, while it is relatively easy to make the translation from audio (say a recording from Glenn Gould from 1955) to the what (which notes), and the when (timing) in a MIDI-like representation, the problem is in the ‘reverse engineering’ of key velocity. What was the speed of Gould’s finger presses on the specific piano he used? The Zenph Studios claim to have solved it for at least a few recordings. Only trust your ears :-)

See also last weeks column on Radio 4 (in Dutch):

(see also earlier comments)

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Familiar with popmusic?

2011-04-07T13:09:00.002+02:00

This week a short entry to promote a PopQuiz made by MSc student Tom Aizenberg to understand more about music and memory. Feel free to share it with your Facebook friends...

Click here to do the listening test (just 10 questions).

Can music be funny?

2011-04-01T00:19:00.003+02:00

In the spirit of today a fragment from New Horizons in Music Appreciation, a program from Radio Station WOOF at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople: an early example of how to attract a wider audience to listen to classical music:

With regard to today's question: David Huron (2004) studied audience laughter in live recordings of Peter Schickele's music (One of the presenters in the broadcast above). In that paper he offers a physiological explanation for why listeners respond to specific musical fragments by producing the distinctive "ha-ha-ha" vocalization....

Huron, D. (2004). Music-engendered laughter: an analysis of humor devices in P.D.Q. Bach Proceedings of the 8th International Conference of Music Perception and Cognition, 700-704.

A case of congenital beat deafness?

2011-03-05T15:59:00.005+01:00

Of most people that claim things like ‘Oh, but I’m not musical at all’, ‘I’m hopeless at keeping a tune’ or ‘I have no sense of rhythm’, only a small percentage turn out to be unmusical. The condition is known as amusia, and those who suffer from it are literally music-deficient. It is a rather exceptional, mostly inherited condition that comprises a range of handicaps in recognising or reproducing melodies and rhythms. It has been estimated that about 4 per cent of the people in Western Europe and North America have problems in this direction, to a greater or lesser degree. The most common handicap is tone-deafness or dysmelodia: the inability or difficulty in hearing the difference between two separate melodies.

To diagnose amusia, the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) has been developed. This test is available online – but wait a while before trying it out :-) People who say: ‘I can’t hold a note,’ ‘I sing out of tune,’ or ‘I have no sense of rhythm,’ are not necessarily suffering from amusia. Such people often confuse poor singing or dancing skills with the absence of a sense of hearing differences in melodies and rhythms. For instance, clapping a complex rhythm or dancing to the music requires quite some practice. Nevertheless, almost all of us can hear the differences between rhythms. It has been established that, even in people who are diagnosed as being tone-deaf, about half of them have a normal sense for rhythm (Peretz & Hyde, 2003).

Jessica Phillips-Silver (Université de Montréal, Canada) and a dream-team of music cognition experts found a person that claims to have truly no sense for rhythm, or, more precisely, is apparently deaf to hearing regularity in music. They describe their results in an upcoming issue of Neuropsychologia.

All tests presented in this intriguing study indeed hint at a person that has a true deficit in picking up the regularity in music (the ‘beat’ or regular pulse).

However, as with other studies on beat induction, it has proven to be very difficult to support the presence or absence of this skill on judging overt behavior such as dancing (see earlier entries on, e.g., Snowball). The study presents one (non-standard) perceptual test on beat perception, and I’m surprised the researchers did not use a relatively simple and far more direct test to see if beat induction is present or absent in this participant, such as the MMN paradigm used in work with newborns (e.g., Honing et al., 2009) or other recent studies making use of brain imaging methods. Would make a great follow-up paper.*

Phillips-Silver, J., Toiviainen, P., Gosselin, N., Piché, O., Nozaradan, S., Palmer, C., & Peretz, I. (2011). Born to dance but beat deaf: A new form of congenital amusia Neuropsychologia DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.02.002

Peretz, I. & Hyde, K. (2003). What is specific to music processing? Insights from congenital amusia Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7 (8), 362-367 DOI: 10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00150-5

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

* In fact, we started working on it this summer (Lidji, Palmer, Honing & Peretz, in preparation)

Can infants recognize melodies heard in the womb?

2011-03-04T16:54:00.005+01:00

Last week PloS One published an interesting finding that shows that one month old infants can recognize a melody that they heard about three weeks before they were born.

Developmental psychobiologist Carolyn Granier-Deferre (Paris Descartes University, France) and her colleagues asked fifty women to play a brief recording of a descending piano melody (one that gets lower in pitch) twice daily in the 35th, 36th and 37th weeks of their pregnancy. When the infants were one month old, both the descending melody and an ascending melody were played to the babies in the laboratory (while they slept; see notation below). On average, the heart rates of the sleeping babies briefly slowed by about twelve beats a minute with the familiar descending melody (right), and by only five or six beats with the unfamiliar ascending melody (left). A result that was interpreted as the infants paying more attention to the familiar than the unfamiliar melody.

We know for a while that newborns can discriminate or perceive most of the acoustic properties of speech. The prevailing theoretical view is that these capacities are mostly independent of previous auditory experience and that newborns have an innate bias or skill for perceiving speech.

By contrast, these results show (as the authors stress in a press release) that merely exposing a human fetus’ developing auditory system to complex stimuli (read ‘music’) can affect how it functions.

Next to role of mere exposure one should add that this result is equally convincing evidence for a newborn’s capacity of perceiving and recalling music (see my earlier ‘language bias’ entry). In that sense this study adds to the growing literature that shows that infants in the womb are sensitive to, and can memorize both melody and rhythm. These findings play an important role in a further understanding of a potential biological and evolutionary role of music (cf. Parncutt, 2009).

Granier-Deferre, C., Bassereau, S., Ribeiro, A., Jacquet, A., & DeCasper, A. (2011). A Melodic Contour Repeatedly Experienced by Human Near-Term Fetuses Elicits a Profound Cardiac Reaction One Month after Birth PLoS ONE, 6 (2) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0017304

Parncutt, R. (2009). Prenatal development and the phylogeny and ontogeny of musical behaviour. In S. Hallam, I. Cross, & M. Thaut (Eds.), Oxford handbook of music psychology (pp. 219-228). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Is music a result of sexual selection?

2011-03-01T15:21:00.001+01:00

For Charles Darwin it was clear: neither the perception nor the production of music were “faculties of the least use to man." At the same occasion he also wrote that “[these faculties] must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.” (Darwin, 1871). Darwin's hunch was that music could be seen as a product of sexual selection, comparable to a male bird’s display of seductive feathers.

This week two of my favorite YouTube videos. They ilustrate - anecdotally - Darwin’s idea of music as a result of sexual selection (At least that is how you could interpret the behavior of these two great performers/musicians and their admiring audience ;-)

However, despite the attractiveness of Darwin’s idea (more recently elaborated by evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey F. Miller in his book The Mating Mind) there are more arguments against than in favor of this line of thought. One being the fact that major differences could then be expected in the anatomy and behavior of men and women, as is the case where sexual selection in songbirds is concerned. Unlike with songbirds, whales, frogs, and other “song”-producing creatures, there is no substantial difference in the way men or women perceive or produce music nor in their physiology related to music processing (cf. Honing, 2011). The search for the origins of music continues...

Blute, M. (2003). [Book Review: The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature] The Quarterly Review of Biology, 78 (1), 129-130 DOI: 10.1086/377917

Honing, H. (in press, 2011) Musical Cognition. A Science of Listening. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.

Darwin, G. (1871) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.London: Murray (p. 878).

Is music a supernormal stimulus?

2011-02-25T15:11:00.005+01:00

One hour of raw footage (!) of an interview of Richard Dawkins with Steven Pinker for "The Genius of Charles Darwin" (UK Channel 4 Television, 2008). Pinker explains again why music is not an adaptation but should be seen as a kind of 'supernormal stimulus' - adding the phrase "people in music hate this theory...".

Was Steven Pinker right after all?

2011-01-19T13:54:00.017+01:00

At the end of the 1990s, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker infamously characterized music as “auditory cheesecake”: a delightful dessert but, from an evolutionary perspective, no more than a by-product of language. But Pinker was probably right when he wrote: “I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of...our mental faculties.” Or, to express his idea less graphically: music affects our brains at specific places, thereby stimulating the production of unique substances that have a pleasurable effect on our mood. However, rather than a by-product of evolution, music or more precisely musicality is likely to be a characteristic that survived natural selection in order to stimulate and develop our mental faculties (cf. Honing, 2011).

Pinker’s idea may actually be a very fruitful hypothesis whose significance has wrongfully gone unacknowledged because of all the criticism it elicited. After all, the purely evolutionary explanations for the origins of music largely overlook the experience of music we all share: the pleasure we derive from it, not only from the acrobatics of making it but also from the act of listening to it.

In a recent study Canadian researchers were able to show precisely that: Music can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving, similar to tangible rewards that involve the striatal dopaminergic system. They were able to show that intense pleasure in response to music can lead to dopamine release in the striatal system. And, more importantly, the anticipation of an abstract reward can result in dopamine release in an anatomical pathway distinct from that associated with the peak pleasure itself.

Salimpoor, V., Benovoy, M., Larcher, K., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music Nature Neuroscience DOI: 10.1038/nn.2726

Honing, H. (in press, 2011) Musical Cognition. A Science of Listening. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.

How musical are you?

2011-01-19T12:50:00.001+01:00

The BBC just launched a new experiment which aims to discover more about the science of musicality. How Musical Are You? was designed by BBC Lab UK in collaboration with academics from the Music, Mind and Brain group at Goldsmiths, University of London. The scientific data will be analyzed to establish whether people who are untrained but passionate about music can be just as musical as people who have been formally trained. The experiment includes questionnaires and musical tests that evaluate your ability to categorize musical styles, memorize tunes, and recognize the beat in pieces of music. The tests aim to assess general musical ability.

The initiative was recently covered on BBC Radio 4's 'Today' programme.
The actual website can be found here.

Interested in doing a PhD at the UvA?

2011-01-18T17:02:00.009+01:00

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam currently has two four-year PhD positions available at the Faculty of Humanities (FGw) and one at the Faculty of Science (FNWI) all starting September 2011. Applications from excellent candidates wishing to conduct research in any of the areas in which ILLC is active are now invited (see description and example projects). N.B. Deadline: 1 February 2011.

See for more information on how to apply here.

Does music make you smarter?

2010-12-28T15:46:00.018+01:00

The next few weeks there will be no new entries in this blog. However, I hope to see some of you on 19 January 2011 [N.B. Cancelled due to illness] when Glenn Schellenberg will give a lecture at the Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam (CSCA) of the University of Amsterdam with the title Does music make you smarter? Schellenberg will show that the available evidence indicates that music listening leads to enhanced performance on a variety of cognitive tests, but that such effects are short-term and stem from the impact of music on arousal level and mood, which, in turn, affect cognitive performance; experiences other than music listening have similar effects. However, music lessons in childhood tell a different story. They are associated with small but general and long-lasting intellectual benefits that cannot be attributed to obvious confounding variables such as family income and parents' education. The mechanisms underlying this association have yet to be determined. Other controversial issues include the direction of causation, and the reason why "real musicians" often fail to exhibit enhanced performance on measures of intelligence.

See here for more information on the lecture and location.

SCHELLENBERG, E., & PERETZ, I. (2008). Music, language and cognition: unresolved issues Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12 (2), 45-46 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2007.11.005

Hearing the music, honing the mind?

2010-12-27T15:13:00.004+01:00

In addition to last weeks entry, a citation from a recent article in Scientific American:

"Music produces profound and lasting changes in the brain. Schools should add classes, not cut them."

See full article.

Kan luisteren de hersenen beïnvloeden? [Dutch]

2010-12-15T15:09:00.003+01:00

This week a video entry with a clip of the Dutch tv program Vrije Geluiden: Last Sunday prof. Erik Scherder (Free University Amsterdam) explained some recent research (by, e.g., Hyde et al., 2009) on the influence of music performance and music listening on brain plasticity.

The full episode can be viewed here (N.B. no subtitles).

Hyde, K., Lerch, J., Norton, A., Forgeard, M., Winner, E., Evans, A., & Schlaug, G. (2009). Musical Training Shapes Structural Brain Development Journal of Neuroscience, 29 (10), 3019-3025 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5118-08.2009

What's new on music and the brain?

2010-12-13T17:43:00.005+01:00

The Mariani Foundation for Paediatric Neurology just announced The Neurosciences and Music - IV: Learning and Memory, to be held in Edinburgh (Scotland, UK) from 9th to 12th June 2011. The conference is conceived as a continuation of the previous meetings on the relation between Music and the Neurosciences in which our Foundation participated: "The Biological Foundations of Music" (New York, 2000), "The Neurosciences and Music - I , Mutual interactions and implications of developmental functions" (Venice, 2002), "The Neurosciences and Music - II, From perception to performance" (Leipzig, 2005) and "The Neurosciences and Music - III, Disorders and plasticity". These conferences have been highly successful and have generated enormous excitement, both among established and new researchers. By providing the opportunity to present new results and exchange information, the meetings have contributed substantially to the growth of new research and collaborations in the neuroscience of music and to its visibility within the broader scientific community.

The central theme of Music and Neurosciences IV will be Learning and Memory. The conference programme will also be divided into 4 subthemes: "Infants and Children", "Adults: musicians and non musicians", "Disabilities and aging-related issues" and "Therapy and Rehabilitation". The conference will include Keynote Lectures, Symposia, Poster Sessions and a Workshop on child-oriented research design and new data acquisition and analysis techniques, to be held in the afternoon on 9th June. The conference will be of interest not only to neuroscientists, psychologists and students but also to clinical neurologists, clinical psychologists, therapists, music performers and educators as well as musicologists.

Edinburgh has been selected as a most appropriate setting because of the IMHSD - Institute for Music in Human and Social Development, established in 2005, which brings together music research, theory and practice from a wide range of disciplines, with an emphasis on learning and rehabilitation. The selected dates are immediately prior to the "Edinburgh International Film Festival" (EIFF), so delegates will have the opportunity to stay on in Edinburgh to attend this event. The EIFF was one of the world's first international film festivals, born alongside the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947, and places a longstanding emphasis upon new talent, discovery and innovation.

Are we ‘illiterate listeners’? [Part 1]

2010-12-05T13:36:00.023+01:00

"French babies cry differently as compared to German babies. This was the conclusion from a study that was published a year ago in Current Biology (see earlier entry). Three day old German babies cry in a downward fashion, their French contemporaries showed an increasing swelling of the cry and stop abruptly.

It was a surprising observation, especially in the light of the general belief that in crying the pitch should always drop as a physiological consequence of the respiratory cycle. Apparently, babies of just a few days old can control both the dynamics and the intonation contour of their crying. Why would they do this?

The researchers interpreted it as the first steps in the development of language. In spoken French the mean intonation contour is rising (dropping at the very end of an utterance), in German the mean intonation typically exhibits a falling contour. This combined with the fact that the human auditory system is already functional in the last trimester of pregnancy made the researchers conclude that these babies picked up the intonation contours of their native language in these last months and consequently imitated them in their crying.

This observation is also surprising since the literature suggests that children only get interested in their native language roughly between six and eighteen months, when they start to imitate it in their babbling. Is it indeed the case, as stressed by these researchers (and the recent literature citing it; e.g. Elk & Hunnius, 2010), that this is unique evidence for a much earlier sensitivity to language than commonly thought? Or is there another interpretation possible?

Although the empirical results are clear, this interpretation is a typical example of what one could call a ‘language bias’: an understandable enthusiasm of linguists to interpret a range of phenomena in the real world as ‘linguistic’. One can, however, easily make the argument that this early sensitivity to intonation contour is a not a linguistic skill but a musical one.

Most linguists see the use of rhythm, dynamics, and intonation as an aid for making infants familiar with the words and sentence structures of the language of the culture in which they will be raised. Words and word divisions are emphasized through exaggerated intonation contours and varied rhythmic intervals, thereby facilitating the process of learning a specific language. These aspects are referred to as prosody, but they are actually the basic building blocks of music. Only much later in the development of a child will this ‘musical prosody’ be used, for instance in the marking, and consequently the recognition of word boundaries. But these early signs of musical skill are — and I like to stress this – not of a linguistic nature. It is the preverbal and preliterate stage of our musical listening in development."

Fragment from inaugural address De ongeletterde luisteraar (Honing, 2010).

Honing, H. (2010). De ongeletterde luisteraar. Over muziekcognitie, muzikaliteit en methodologie. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

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

Elk, M. van & Hunnius, S. (2010) Het babybrein, over de ontwikkeling van de hersenen bij baby's. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.

A 2006 recording of Glenn Gould? (Part 2)

2010-12-03T13:47:00.001+01:00

A video follow-up of an earlier entry on Glenn Gould.

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Is music cognition?

2010-11-18T14:42:00.006+01:00

Many studies on the evolution of music concern the question of what defines music. Can birdsong, the song structure of humpback whales, a Thai elephant orchestra, or the interlocking duets of Gibbons be considered music?

The answer is of course a simple ‘yes’. A definition of music can easily be stretched to include all types of sound, noises and even plain silence. As such it makes the discussion of what is and what is not music one of the most noticeable pitfalls in the study of music and evolution. An alternative is to separate between the notions of ‘music’ and ‘musicality’, with musicality as a natural, spontaneously developing trait based on and constrained by our cognitive system, and music as a social and cultural construct based on that very musicality.

Of course this definition of musicality is still too general to be useful. The challenge is to define what precisely makes up this trait we call musicality. What are the cognitive mechanisms that are essential to perceive, make and appreciate music? Only when we have identified these fundamental mechanisms are we in a position to see how these might have evolved. In other words, the study of the evolution of music cognition is conditional on a characterization of the basic mechanisms that make up musicality.

Furthermore, it is important to separate between the biological (or genetic) and cognitive (or functional) aspects that might contribute to musicality. While it is common to assume that there is a mapping between specific genotypes and specific cognitive traits, more and more studies show that genetically distantly related species can show similar cognitive skills; skills that more genetically closely related species fail to show. For example, more and more studies show that humans and certain bird species share their musicality up to a certain level, whereas humans and chimpanzees do not.

de Waal, F., & Ferrari, P. (2010). Towards a bottom-up perspective on animal and human cognition Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14 (5), 201-207 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2010.03.003

Honing, H., & Ploeger, A. (submitted). Cognition and the evolution of music: pitfalls and prospects. Topics in Cognitive Science (TopiCS).

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Geeft het hoofd de geest? [Dutch]

2010-10-28T17:25:00.003+02:00

Aardig promotiefilmpje met de titel 'Cognitie: het hoofd dat de geest geeft' over cognitieonderzoek, gemaakt in het kader van het bètacanon initiatief...

What's new on music and the brain?

2010-10-22T17:06:00.000+02:00

The North-American Library of Congress organized an interesting series on Music and the Brain with lectures, conversations and symposia about the explosion of new research at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and music. The podcasts can be accessed via their website.

Muziek maakt slimmer? [Dutch]

2010-09-23T16:44:00.006+02:00

Net zoals in de jaren negentig in de VS blijft het idee dat muziek slimmer maakt opduiken in de - op zich zeer te prijzen - lobby om muziek te promoten in het onderwijs. Zo ook het recente Nederlandse initiatief Muziek Telt.
Het is echter nogal een zwaktebod om het belang van muziek aan te willen tonen door te benadrukken dat muziek een andere menselijke kwaliteit positief beïnvloedt. En wel een kwaliteit die we kennelijk belangrijker vinden. In dit geval: intelligentie. Het bevestigt in wezen het idee van muziek als tweederangs activiteit (nog los van het feit dat er geen enkele evidentie is dat muziek inderdaad slimmer maakt; het zgn. ‘Mozart-effect’) [zie eerdere blogs] Ik ondersteun het initiatief van harte, maar daag de initiatiefnemers uit om vooral het intrinsieke belang van muziek voor het voetlicht te brengen.

Is iedereen muzikaal? [Dutch]

2010-09-20T18:48:00.004+02:00

Vanaf begin september is er elke maandag op Radio 4 een rubriek over muziekcognitie. Elke week wordt een antwoord gegeven op een actuele vraag. Voor de aflevering van week 38 - Zijn musici seksueel aantrekkelijk? - zie uitzending gemist.

Whats happening at the ICMPC?

2010-08-26T18:01:00.002+02:00

Every two years the international conference on music perception and cognition (ICMPC) is organized. This year it is in Seattle, US. If you like to know what is happening in the field, Victoria Williamson reports on it in a daily review on a selection of papers presented the previous day. Later this week more reports from this conference.

Feel like I-dosing?

2010-07-30T15:45:00.019+02:00

A few months ago my facebook friends in the US started mentioning it. Only a few weeks later it appeared in the news in Europe, generating a lot of noise in Belgium last week when I-dosing or ‘binaural beats’ were condemned as a form of narcotics.

The phenomenon of ‘binaural beats’ was first described in 1839 by Heinrich Wilhelm Dove. It is the sensation of hearing interference beats when two slightly different frequencies are played separately to each ear. The rate of the ‘perceived’ beats were claimed to modulate ones brain waves. However, little or no evidence has been brought forward since then. The few studies that seriously studied the effect could not support this claim (e.g., Owens et al., 1998), except that that it might have some effect on attention and arousal. Quite understandable, if you listen to one of the examples (see link).

The recent media attention for this phenomenon seems to be successfully bootstrapped by a new company selling mp3’s with titles like ‘Quick Hit Simulations’ describing their product with statements like ‘binaural beats will synchronize your brainwaves and help you achieve a quick hitting simulated drug simulation.’ Prices around twenty dollar. This one's for free :-)

Owens, J. et al. (1998). Binaural Auditory Beats Affect Vigilance Performance and Mood. Physiology & Behavior, 63 (2), 249-252. DOI: 10.1016/S0031-9384(97)00436-8.

Dunning, Brian. "Binaural Beats: Digital Drugs." Skeptoid Podcast. Skeptoid Media, Inc., 31 Mar 2009. Web. 31 Jul 2010. link.

Looking for a PhD position in Music Cognition?

2010-07-19T14:56:00.002+02:00

This week a brief entry to announce a job opportunity at the University of Amsterdam. See for detailed information and how to apply here. Deadline for applications: 1 September 2010.

Standardization cause of poor reproducibility?

2010-07-05T18:40:00.013+02:00

In the last few years Web-based experiments have become an attractive alternative to lab-based experiments. Next to the advantages of versatility and the ecological validity of the results, Web-based experiments can potentially reach a much larger, more varied and intrinsically motivated participant pool. Especially in the domain of music perception and cognition it is important to probe a wide variety of participants, with different levels of training and cultural backgrounds.

Nevertheless, to get research published that takes advantage of the Internet is not straightforward. An important reason for the conservatism held by some journals in publishing results obtained with Web-based experiments is the issue of replicability. Especially in the fields of experimental psychology and psychophysics there are serious concerns about the (apparent) lack of control one has in Web experiments as opposed to those performed in the laboratory. Where in the lab most relevant factors, including all technical issues, are under control of the experimenter (i.e. have a high internal validity) it is argued that Web experiments lack this important foundation of experimental psychology. As a result of the first issue, it often proves to be problematic to convince University Review Panels to give permission when there is little insight in the environment in which participants tend to do these experiments. As a result of the second issue, some high-impact journals made it a policy decision not to publish Web-based studies, as such discouraging Web experiments to be performed (cf. Honing & Ladinig, 2008; Honing & Reips, 2008). Nevertheless, it is important to stress that if an effect is found - despite the limited control in Web-based experiments over the home environment and the technological variance caused by the Internet - then the argument for that effect and its generalizability is even stronger.

The latter issue was recently discussed in an issue of Nature Methods by researchers from the Universities of Giessen and Münster, Germany (see reference below and [modified] figure above). In fact, the authors make the opposite argument! They argue that standardization should be seen as a cause of, rather than a cure for, poor reproducibility of experimental outcomes. Their study showed that environmental standardization can contribute to spurious and conflicting findings in the literature. Würbel and colleagues conclude that to generate results that are most likely going to be reproducible in other laboratories, the strategies to standardize environmental conditions in an experiment should be minimized.

As such the variance caused by Web-based setups (as discussed above) might actually amount to experimental results with a much higher external validity than thought before.

Richter, S., Garner, J., Auer, C., Kunert, J., & Würbel, H. (2010). Systematic variation improves reproducibility of animal experiments. Nature Methods, 7 (3), 167-168. 10.1038/nmeth0310-167

Honing, H., & Reips, U.-D. (2008). Web-based versus lab-based studies: a response to Kendall (2008). Empirical Musicology Review, 3 (2), 73-77.

Honing, H., & Ladinig, O. (2008). The potential of the Internet for music perception research: A comment on lab-based versus Web-based studies. Empirical Musicology Review, 3 (1), 4-7.

Complex nonlinguistic auditory processing?

2010-06-05T22:59:00.013+02:00

Quite an impressive phrase, not? It was quoted in a recent interview with Ani Patel in the New York Times, and attributed to one of the most prominent researchers in the neuroscience of music:

"Robert Zatorre never used the word music in a grant application. He knew it would get turned down automatically because people thought this was not scientific. Instead, he used terms like 'complex nonlinguistic auditory processing.' Luckily, in recent years, it’s become O.K. to say: I study music and the brain."

Still, these days it is not uncommon that reviewers of ambitious research proposals request a description of the implications of the proposed research beyond music. As an example, I was recently urged by a (high profile) reviewer to explain the potential impact of my proposal to the domain of linguistics (and language in general). This as an important validation of the research programme... I look forward to the time that a language researcher will be asked to state what the implications are of his/her research programme for the science of music :-) Until that time we need people like Robert Zatorre and Ani Patel as ambassadors of the field. They do a great job!

Zatorre, R. (2005). Music, the food of neuroscience? Nature, 434 (7031), 312-315 DOI: 10.1038/434312a

Can reading program notes reduce your enjoyment of music?

2010-05-01T14:47:00.000+02:00

The latest issue of Psychology of Music includes an interesting study by Lisa Margulis (University of Arkansas) who decided to investigate what the effects are of the widespread practice of including program notes for classical concerts on musical experience.

In this study, the researchers presented people without formal musical training excerpts from Beethoven String Quartets prefaced by either a dramatic description, a structural description, or no description al all. Consequently, they were asked to rate their enjoyment of the music, and in a later stage, to recall excerpts and descriptions.

What would you expect the results were?

The results show a significant negative effect of description, suggesting that prefacing an excerpt with a text description reduces enjoyment of the music. In the end Margulis gently summarizes the findings as ‘conceptualizing listening by connecting it to linguistically named correlates (a practice fundamental to music training) may have more multifarious (and not always straightforwardly beneficial) effects on musical experience than commonly assumed.’ Yet another case that ‘to know more’ is not always ‘to hear more’.

For details and potential implications of the study, listen to item from WNYC radio:

Margulis, E. (2010). When program notes don't help: Music descriptions and enjoyment Psychology of Music DOI: 10.1177/0305735609351921

Is beat induction innate or learned?

2010-04-18T13:11:00.003+02:00

This week a short entry with a selection of discussions related to the newborn study mentioned in last months entry.

Discussion at ScienceNews by Bruce Bower.
Discussion at Wired by Brandon Keim.
Interview at WNYC Public Radio by John Schaefer: [soundfile]
Report by Science Update by Bob Hirshon: [soundfile]
Report by NewScientist by Hazel Muir, video by Sandrine Ceurstemont:

For more media attention see Google news.

Winkler, I., Haden, G., Ladinig, O., Sziller, I., & Honing, H. (2009). Newborn infants detect the beat in music Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (7), 2468-2471 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0809035106

Anecdotal or real evidence?

2010-04-02T13:34:00.010+02:00

This week a short anecdotal yet inspiring video.

However, students referred me to this and this video. So is it music or merely sound that stops the baby from crying? Time for a real experiment...

Trehub, S. E. (2009). Music lessons from infants. In: Oxford handbook of music psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 229-234.

Is music mere play?

2010-04-01T01:00:00.000+02:00

Not too long ago I was called by the Dutch radio for a daily question on science, and was confronted with the question: Why do we like music?

Since why-questions are generally almost impossible to answer, I was happy —just in time— to think of the idea of ‘music as play’. But because all of this went almost too quickly, I thought I would eloborate on this in a slightly more slower pace in this blog...

The idea is that music, as a human phenomenon, can be seen as something that plays with our senses, our memory, our attention and our emotions, in the way young lions play, without any real threat. Music, generally, does not harm us, it also doesn’t make us less hungry, nevertheless it directly addresses our physiological and cognitive functions. For many music listeners this is a pleasant, rewarding, purposeful and sometimes even a consoling play.

I like this idea of ‘music as play’ (or 'music as a game') far better than the discussion on whether music is an adaptation or a mere evolutionary by-product of more important functions, such as those involved in language (Pinker, 1997). Also Geoffrey Miller’s alternative suggesting sexual selection to be the primary mechanism in the evolution of music is still lacking the proper arguments and evidence. ‘Music as play’ is far more attractive, because it might explain several of our strange behaviors, such as listening to ‘sad’ music when we are sad, to make us even more sad — we apparently know it will not really harm us!

The idea of ‘humans as players’ was brought forward by several authors, including the brilliant Johan Huizinga who wrote Homo Ludens (‘Man the Player’) in the 1930s. It also was the topic of the 2007 Huizinga lecture by Tijs Goldschmidt - a biologist and writer known from, e.g., Darwin's Dreampond. His lecture was called Doen alsof je doet alsof (‘Pretend to pretend’) and he even spent a few words about music (Goldschmidt, 2007:20-21). It was an important source of inspiration to write Iedereen is muzikaal :-)

WESSELING, H. (2002). From cultural historian to cultural critic: Johan Huizinga and the spirit of the 1930s European Review, 10 (04) DOI: 10.1017/S106279870200039X

N.B. This is a rewrite of a blog entry of 28.11.2007

Do infants prefer music over speech?

2010-03-16T14:54:00.008+01:00

In this weeks online edition of PNAS Marcel Zentner and Tuomas Eerola report on a study in which they carried out two experiments with a total of 120 infants, aged between 5 and 24 months. The infants were exposed to various musical and rhythmic stimuli, including isochronous drumbeats. Control stimuli consisted of adult- and infant-directed speech. The researchers could show that infants engage significantly more in rhythmic movement to music, and other rhythmically regular sounds, than to speech. The findings are suggestive of a predisposition for rhythmic movement in response to music and other metrically regular sounds. The study also adds to the existing evidence that infants have a liking and preference for rhythmical music from day one, a predisposition that preceeds language.

Zentner, M., & Eerola, T. (2010). Rhythmic engagement with music in infancy Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1000121107

Music Matters blog moved to new location

2010-03-13T17:37:00.004+01:00

Since Blogger no longer supports ftp publishing, this blog has moved to a new location at http://musiccognition.blogspot.com/. However, all links to olders posts stay in place (after thirty seconds one will be redirected to the new blog).

Are emotions in music universal?

2010-03-10T11:18:00.014+01:00

While there are plenty of theories on how music and emotion might be related (see reference below -Juslin & Västfjäll (2008)- for an 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 from Deutsche Welle:

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?

2010-03-01T21:17:00.012+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?

2010-02-02T14:08:00.004+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 (Available in English in Spring 2011).

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)

2010-01-04T19:05:00.012+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]

2010-01-03T17:37:00.008+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]

2009-12-31T16:22:00.008+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?

2009-12-17T12:09:00.008+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?

2009-11-26T20:18:00.020+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]

2009-11-01T17:53:00.010+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?

2009-10-22T23:48:00.035+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]

2009-10-12T15:00:00.008+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?

2009-09-30T14:06:00.005+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)

2009-09-19T08:00:00.009+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 so gracefully helped boosting the visibility of research in the neuroscience and cognition of music. The other video shows Snowball (and his owner Irene Schulz) at the World Science Festival. Is Snowball listening or imitating?

However, see earlier entry on beat induction for a critique.

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?

2009-09-15T21:46:00.009+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.

Een passie voor muziek? [Dutch]

2009-08-28T17:55:00.008+02:00

Manuscripta, de feestelijke opening van het boekenseizoen, wordt dit jaar uitgebreid met een internationaal podium. De line-up varieert van zeer populair tot uiterst literair:

Auteurs die acte de présence geven op het internationale podium zijn onder anderen Abraham Verghese, over zijn meeslepende familiesaga De heelmeesters (De Bezige Bij), en muziekjournaliste Jessica Duchen (Hongaarse dansen, De Kern). Zij gaat met muziekwetenschapper Henkjan Honing in gesprek over ‘passie voor muziek’.

De Engelse Jessica Duchen is naast succesvol romanschrijfster ook muziekjournaliste en interviewde vele kopstukken uit de muziekwereld. Henkjan Honing is muziekwetenschapper en schreef het populairwetenschappelijke boek Iedereen is muzikaal, over wat we denken, voelen, ons herinneren en verwachten bij het luisteren naar muziek. Laat je aansteken door de passie voor muziek!

Gespreksleider: Kristien Hemmerechts

Plaats: Flex Bar, Grote zaal, Westergasfariek, Amsterdam.
Tijd: zondag 6 september, aanvang: 16:30, duur: 45 min.
Voertaal: Engels.

Zin om een bèta test te doen? [Dutch]

2009-08-07T15:10:00.006+02:00

Ik ben afgelopen week begonnen met het opzetten van een website met luistervoorbeelden en demonstraties die bij een boekje horen dat a.s. november zal verschijnen.

Het zou me erg helpen als een aantal mensen het luistervoorbeeld 5a zouden willen testen om te zien of alle functionaliteit naar behoren werkt.

Mocht je opmerkingen of suggesties hebben, gebruik dan het reactieveld onderaan het luistervoorbeeld.

Bij voorbaat dank!

In Amsterdam this week?

2009-07-29T17:23:00.015+02:00

For scientists it is nothing special: traveling all summer, visiting several workshops and conferences.
You get to present your years' work in a presentation of just a few minutes (after hours of traveling), and hear a huge number of talks by others (who also have to squeeze their years’ work in a fifteen minutes talk).

Nevertheless, it can be refreshing, these meetings: novel insights, strange data, elegant formalizations or just fun interpretations, all condensed in these strange ten minutes of attention...

This week the Cogsci -Cognitive Science- Conference is in Amsterdam (the first time I will go to a conference on my bike!).

Together with Martin Rohrmeier, Patrick Rebuschat, Psyche Loui, Geraint Wiggins, Marcus T. Pearce and Daniel Muellensiefen our symposium will try to raise the profile of music cognition research:

"In recent years, the study of music perception and cognition has witnessed an enormous growth of interest. Music cognition is an intrinsically interdisciplinary subject which combines insights and research methods from many of the cognitive sciences. This trend is clearly reflected, for example, in the contributions in special issues on music, published by journals such as Nature, Cognition, Nature Neuroscience, and Connection Science. This symposium focuses on music learning and processing and will feature perspectives from cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, computational modeling, linguistics, and musicology. The objective is to bring together researchers from different research fields and traditions in order to discuss the progress made, and future directions to take, in the interdisciplinary study of music cognition. The symposium also aims to illustrate how closely the area of music cognition is linked to topics and debates in the cognitive sciences."

If you are around, please join!

N. A. Taatgen & H. van Rijn (Eds.) (2009). Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society

Why is the blog so silent the last few weeks?

2009-07-26T20:08:00.000+02:00

This summer you will find less postings than usual on this blog. This is because I'm busy finalizing a book and a number of research proposals, hopefully generating some new jobs in music cognition :-) So no worry, this is just a summer dip ...

What's new in the neurosciences and music?

2009-07-08T17:46:00.002+02:00

Volume 1169 of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences is about to be published with the title The Neurosciences and Music III: Disorders and Plasticity. The volume explores issues related to music and medicine through a focus on musical disorders and plasticity.

Should music be part of early education?

2009-06-30T08:45:00.000+02:00

Oliver Sacks on why musical training should be a part of early education:

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A gene for music?

2009-05-30T21:59:00.001+02:00

Last week a paper was published in PLoS-ONE suggesting a relation between AVPR1A-Haplotypes and musical creativity. A group of Finish researchers analyzed 19 families with a total of 343 family members on their musical aptitude —using the Seashore test and a test developed by one of the authors— and their DNA profiles. They were able to show an association between these and related genes and levels of musical creativity. The research contrasts earlier research with twins that suggested no such relation (e.g., Coon & Carey, 1989). The authors propose the interesting hypothesis that music perception and creativity in music are linked to the same phenotypic spectrum of human cognitive social skills, like human bonding and altruism, both associated with AVPR1A. Music as a form of ‘extreme’ bonding behavior...

It was just a matter of time for such a study to emerge. Still, the results of this study are merely correlational. I like to think of the capacity for music as shared instead of being special, and a result of complex nature and nurture interactions.

Ukkola, L., Onkamo, P., Raijas, P., Karma, K., & Järvelä, I. (2009). Musical Aptitude Is Associated with AVPR1A-Haplotypes PLoS ONE, 4 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005534

Coon, H., & Carey, G. (1989). Genetic and environmental determinants of musical ability in twins Behavior Genetics, 19 (2), 183-193 DOI: 10.1007/BF01065903

Wanneer ben je muzikaal? [Dutch]

2009-05-26T17:30:00.009+02:00

Afgelopen zondagochtend gaf ik een kinderlezing in het Nemo, Amsterdam voor kinderen van acht tot twaalf jaar. Wat is dat leuk!

Op de vraag Wie is er muzikaal? staken in eerste instantie ongeveer vijftien kinderen hun vinger op. Slechts een paar kinderen vonden zichzelf absoluut niet muzikaal, en bijna iedereen kende wel iemand die niet muzikaal is. 'Mijn papa zingt heel vals!', riep iemand.

Aan het einde van de lezing vroeg ik nog een keer wie zichzelf muzikaal vond en toen gingen bijna alle vingers omhoog. Missie geslaagd :-)

Voor een verslag van de kinderlezing van Edda Heinsman, met foto’s van Hanne Nijhuis, zie hier.

Is beat induction special? (Part 5)

2009-05-04T13:00:00.013+02:00

This year several new insights were published on the phenomenon of beat induction.* Beat induction is the cognitive skill that allows us to hear a regular pulse in music to which we can synchronize. It allows us to dance and make music together. Hence it is considered a skill that must have contributed to the origins of music. Without it, making music would be quite difficult.

Most of these recent studies try to support (or falsify) the criteria that beat induction, as a cognitive skill that allows for music, should fulfill — it should at least be a) special to music (domain-specific), b) develop spontaneously (or be innate), and c) be uniquely human (human-specific).

In earlier blogs I discussed some recent evidence that beat induction is active in newborns, providing support for the innate criterion. This week two new studies appeared in Current Biology challenging the human-specific criterion (see also BBC News or Dutch radio).

The evidence is compelling (and will cost me two bottles of wine). Both the studies of Schachner et al. and Patel et al. show that it is unlikely due to chance that one cockatoo and twentyfive parrots synchronized to music.

Especially Patel and Iversen’s tempo controlled experiment is interesting because there it could be studied whether the cockatoo is actually listening to the music. Although the current paper is only reporting on bouts where the cockatoo synchronized (selected by the researchers !), some tests show this is not simply due to chance. However, synchrony in about ten percent of all recordings is not a lot for a bird that seems to enjoy dancing and almost constantly moves to the music.

Furthermore, it is surprising that Schacher et al. state that none of their bird-subjects was 'explicitly trained to produce movement in response to acoustic material.' This is at least not true for the cockatoo Snowball who was analyzed in both studies. As Patel et al. write, Snowball (likely) learned his foot-lifting behavior from a previous owner making arm movements in synchrony while dancing (to music).

Snowball needs to be in the mood for dancing and has to be enthusiastically spoken too to start him up. It suggests an important role of the owner/trainer being present at the experiment (by the way, it is unclear whether the researchers were actually present at these recording sessions). In addition, during at least half of the experiments the current owner was nodding her head (apparently not systematically influencing the results). It seems Snowball deserves a more formal, yet attractive setting in the near future.

Overall, it makes me interpret these data as learned behavior and a mimicking phenomenon, more than an innate or spontaneously developing form of beat induction that humans have.

Nevertheless, it interesting to think what makes parrots and cockatoos receptive to beat induction, instead of our closer relatives like chimpanzees or bonobo’s? Patel suggests the vocal learning hypothesis: the capacity for entrainment as a by-product of selecting for vocal-mimicking, with both needing modality-specific links between auditory and motor representations. Others believe it is the particular rhythmic chorusing (as a behavior of complex social groups) that is the source of the behavior. I’m currently simply ‘confused’, the best a new empirical finding can do!

Schachner, A., Brady, T., Pepperberg, I., & Hauser, M. (2009). Spontaneous Motor Entrainment to Music in Multiple Vocal Mimicking Species Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.061

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

* Beat induction is also referred to as Beat Perception and Synchronization (BPS; Patel, 2008), Sensorimotor Synchronization (SMS; Repp, 2005), or as audio entrainment (cf. Large & Jones, 1999).

De do do do, de da da da?*

2009-04-19T21:56:00.008+02:00

For a long time I thought of it as quite a peculiar phenomenon: grown-ups who, the moment they spot a baby, start talking in a curious dialect. A dialect that has unclear semantics, little or no grammar, and is full of exaggerated rhythmic and melodic diversions.

Nevertheless, babies seem to love it. They react —cooing with pleasure—to melodies that are not unlike pop songs as ‘De do do do, de da da da’ of The Police or ‘La la la’ by Kylie Minoque.

This babbling or, more formally, infant-direct speech (IDS) differs from normal adult speech by its high pitch, exaggerated melodic contours, slower tempo, and more rhythmic variation. A kind of ‘musilanguage’ indeed. It is a widespread phenomenon that is —as far as we know— present in all cultures and has more similarities than differences -- even when some characteristics of IDS conflict with the rules of the adult language (e.g. Chinese). So it seems quite unlikely that IDS is ‘just’ a preparation for language, until recently the most common interpretation.

Laurel Trainor, and her team at McMaster University (Ontario, Canada), suggests that IDS is essentially a tool to communicate emotion. The decoding of the speech patterns into their emotional meaning is something infants can do easily, and long before they learn about language. In that sense, it seems likely that language makes use of faculties special to music instead of it being a side effect of language (as as suggested once by a well-known cognitive psychologist).

Henkjan Honing (2008). De vergeten luisteraar [The Forgotten Listener] Boekman (77), 42-47

* Repeated from June 6th, 2008.

Do you have perfect pitch?

2009-04-14T19:36:00.003+02:00

Glenn Schellenberg of the University of Toronto just started an online internet experiment on Absolute Pitch (AP). If you have, or suspect you have, absolute pitch do the online test here. It takes about 15 minutes and you get your score in the end.

Art meets science?

2009-04-10T17:20:00.013+02:00

Below a video impression of an evening that was organized this week by the Studium Generale of the University of Groningen. The idea of the lecture/concert was to explore tempo and timing, swing and groove from the perspective of both the performer and the listener (an idea that turned out not always to be a success ;-) See for a longer fragment here.

How well would you do as an expert?

2009-03-29T22:52:00.018+02:00

In the Netherlands (and I’m sure there are versions of it in the UK and the US as well) there is a weekly radio show containing a returning item in which music experts are asked to compare and judge two or three CD recordings of the same piece, without knowing who the musicians are. They have to guess the performers and describe why they do (or don’t) like that particular performance.

How well would you do in such a test? The common hypothesis is that experts do this much better, e.g. under the assumption that they are more sensitive in their listening skills. But do experts indeed hear more detali and more nuances when compared to a 'common listener'? Or do they just have more terminology available to verbalize these differences?

Two years ago our group did a large-scale online listening experiment with a similar task. Participants were asked to compare several pairs of recordings of well-known musicians. One of the recordings was taken directly from a CD, but the other was originally performed at another tempo (faster or slower) and then scaled to be similar in tempo to the former recording. The task was to judge which recording was real and which one was manipulated, by focusing on the timing used by the performer.

To give you an idea of the difficulty of the task, below an example.

A
B

The results were recently published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, with a surprising outcome: the judgments seem to be largely influenced by exposure to music (listening a lot to one’s favorite music) and not (at all) by the level of expertise (amount of formal musical training). One seems to learn a lot by simply listening.

Honing, H., & Ladinig, O. (2009). Exposure influences expressive timing judgments in music. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 35 (1), 281-288 DOI: 10.1037/a0012732

* The first recording is the original. It is Glenn Gould performing English Suite No. 4 by J.S. Bach. The second recording is Sviatoslav Richter performing the same piece. However, this recording was sped up from 70 to 87 bpm making his use of tempo rubato 'unnatural'.

What makes a theory compelling?*

2009-03-05T20:49:00.022+01:00

Karl Popper was a philosopher of science that was very much interested in this question. He tried to distinguish 'science' from 'pseudoscience', but got more and more dissatisfied with the idea that the empirical method (supporting a theory with observations and experiments) could effectively mark this distinction. He sometimes used the example of astrology “with its stupendous mass of empirical evidence based on observation”, but also nuanced it by stating that “science often errs, and that pseudoscience may happen to stumble on the truth.”

Next to his well-known work on falsification, Popper started to develop alternatives to determine the scientific status or quality of a theory. He wrote the complex yet intriguing sentence “confirmations [of a theory] should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.” (Popper, 1963).

Popper was especially thrilled with the result of Eddington’s eclipse observations, which in 1919 brought the first important confirmation of Einstein's theory of gravitation. It was the surprising consequence of this theory that light should bend in the presence of large, heavy objects (Einstein was apparently willing to drop his theory if this would not be the case). Independent of whether such a prediction turns out to be true or not, Popper considered it an important quality of ‘real science’ to make such ‘risky predictions’. Interesting thought, not?

I still find this an intriguing idea. The notion of ‘risky’ or ‘surprising predictions’ might actually be the beginning of a fruitful alternative to existing model selection techniques, such as goodness-of-fit (which theory predicts the data best) and simplicity (which theory gives the simplest explanation). Also in music cognition measures like goodness-of-fit (r-squared, percentage variance accounted for, and other measures from the experimental psychology toolkit) are often used to confirm a theory. Nevertheless, it is non-trivial to think of theories that make surprising predictions. That is, a theory that predicts a yet unknown phenomenon as a consequence of the intrinsic structure of the theory itself. If you know of any, let me know!

K. R. Popper (1963). Conjectures and Refutations. London: Routledge.

* Repeated blog entry from July 23, 2007 (celebrating finalizing a research proposal with Jan-Willem Romeijn on these issues, hoping to be able to address these issues head-on ;-)

Do newborn infants have a sense of rhythm?

2009-01-27T19:00:00.003+01:00

[Report related to PNAS Early Edition]

It might look somewhat disturbing, but the picture that accompanies this entry is a snapshot of a two day old baby that is healthy and sound asleep! She is one of fourteen newborns that participated in a recent listening experiment, a collaboration between the Institute for Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and our research group at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. In this project we are interested in how newborn infants perceive the musical world around them and in how far certain musical skills are innate.

We know that newborn infants are sensitive to a variety of sounds. But what do they factually hear? Can they make sense of the musical world around them? Do they have a sense of rhythm, arguably one of the fundaments of music?

To study this, we collaborated with a research group in Budapest, Hungary lead by István Winkler, a specialist in auditory perception and one of the pioneers in measuring brain activity in neonates.

Since the start of this European research project (named EmCAP) we talked a lot about how we could take advantage of existing theories in music cognition to study auditory perception in newborn infants, and how to probe their (potential) sense of rhythm. After many pilot studies, and resolving quite a few methodological issues that come with doing experiments with neonates, in the end we opted to use a simple, regular rock rhythm, consisting of hi-hat, snare, and bass drum (see below). We made several variants of this rock rhythm by omitting strokes on non-significant metrical positions (i.e. non-syncopated rhythms in music theoretical terms). We then inserted, once in a while, a 'deviant' segment: the same rhythm but with a missing ‘downbeat’ (i.e. a syncopated rhythm). The result sounded like this [click on the play button; to stop, click again]:

Since it is quite difficult to observe behavioral reactions in newborns a small number of electrodes were carefully glued to the scalp and face of the newborns to be able to measure their electrical brain signals (see photo). N.B. The baby’s were fed just before the measurements with their mother being present during the whole session that lasted twenty minutes.

What did the experiment reveal? Well, shortly after each ‘deviant’ segment began, the babies' brains produced an electrical response indicating that they had expected to hear the downbeat but had not. As such we could show that newborn infants can detect the beat in music (The results will be published this week in PNAS Early Edition).

What are the potential implications of these findings? For me, one of the most important realizations is that a cognitive skill called beat induction, which most of us think of as trivial (e.g., being able to tap your foot to the beat), is active so early in life. It can be seen as additional support for the idea that, beat perception contributed to the origins of music since it enabling such actions as clapping, making music together and dancing to a rhythm. Next to being music-specific, beat induction is also considered to be uniquely human. Even our closest evolutionary relatives, such as the chimpanzee and bonobo, do not synchronize their behavior to rhythmic sounds. This makes the topic of beat induction a fundamental issue in current music cognition research (see, e.g., Patel, 2008:402).

Furthermore, the results challenge some earlier assumptions that beat induction is learned in the first few months of life, for example by parents rocking the infant. Our study suggests that beat perception must be either innate or learned in the womb (as the auditory system is at least partly functional as of approximately three month before birth).

Finally, it should be noted that the auditory capabilities underlying beat induction are also necessary for bootstrapping communication by sounds, allowing infants to adapt to the rhythm of the caretaker’s speech and to find out when to respond to it or to interject their own vocalization. Therefore, although these results are compatible with the notion of the genetic origin of music in humans, they do not provide the final answer in this longstanding debate.

István Winkler, Gábor P. Háden, Olivia Ladinig, István Sziller, Henkjan Honing (2009). Newborn infants detect the beat in music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0809035106