Lure(d) into listening?

This weekend there was a Matchmaking meeting event in Paris, organized by HERA —an EU 6th Framework Programme ERA-NET project aiming at strengthening the European voice in the Humanities—, on Cultural Dynamics and the Creative Industry.

The idea our group brought forward was Listen, Lure & Locate: A Project on Music, Internet and Listening Cultures that proposes to investigate older and newer internet technologies that support sharing musical taste and exchange of musical listening experiences.

The proposal (in preparation) aims not only to analyze and explicate these existing listening communities (e.g. Last.fm, YouTube, Pandora) but also to actively experiment with Web 2.0 technologies by designing and constructing virtual listening spaces that will allow participants to share their listening experiences (LISTEN), make other listeners enthusiastic for a certain musical fragment (LURE), and mark a specific location in an actual recording (LOCATE) - a specific point in the music where a particular listener experienced something special or that s/he considers musically striking or intriguing.

The LOCATE-component of the project was inspired by some early work of John Sloboda (Keele University). He found that a large portion of music listeners could locate (in the score or a recording) specific musical passages that reliably evoked, e.g., shivers down the spine, laughter, tears or a lump in the throat (Sloboda, 1991).

At the meeting I asked several people the question mentioned below. Take part in an online poll?



Sloboda, J.A. (1991). Music Structure and Emotional Response: Some Empirical Findings. Psychology of Music, 19(2), 110-120. DOI: 10.1177/0305735691192002

Muziek speelt met de luisteraar [Dutch]

This week a video that was directed by Bob van Gijzel (AVC/UvA) as part of a series of short films with the title De Fascinatie: Scholars and scientists from the Universiteit van Amsterdam talk about their fascination in research. This one is on music cognition. Below a short fragment (in Dutch):


Click here for the full episode.

Can newborns make sense of rhythm? (Part 2)

In search of the origins of music perception, our European research consortium (named EmCAP) investigates questions such as whether or not newborns possess the ability to process music. However, while we all intuitively feel that babies like rhythms and melodies, we don’t know how they perceive music. This week the MTAPI team started a first series of experiments to test whether rhythm and meter perception is active in newborn infants.

Our hypothesis is that a rhythmic stimulus (we use a simple drum pattern), when occasionally modified in two distinct metrical positions (a temporal oddball), should be perceived more easily as a deviation if the modification happens in a metrically strong position as compared to one in a weaker metrical position, as such indicating that a metrical expectation is active. These so-called oddballs are expected to elicit the mismatch negativity (MMN) event related brain potential (ERP), a well-known response that is elicited by violations of a detected acoustic regularity.

One of the reasons this particular method was chosen was that it allows us to use the same technique and the same rhythmic stimuli for both adult non-musicians and newborn infants. The preliminary results confirm the hypothesis for adults. Needless to say we are more than curious for what the newborn study will show us. We hope to present the first results at the upcoming Neurosciences and Music conference in Montreal this summer.

Honing, H., Ladinig, O., Winkler, I., Haden, G. (in press) Probing emergent meter perception in adults (and newborns) using event-related brain potentials: a pilot study. Proceedings of the Neurosciences and music III Conference. Montreal: McGill University.

Can musical expression be understood?

In 1985 the composer György Ligeti published some wonderful Etudes for piano. I regularly listen to them ever since. They were also the material (or at least a few bars of “Cordes Vides”) to test an idea for an expression editor: a system that was aimed to facilitate editing operations that are musically meaningful while at the same time amounting to perceptually sound results. The editor, named Expresso, was conceived as a calculus of expression. Quite an ambitious project that aimed to formally describe how different types of expression are linked to different types of musical structure.

The research was inspired by several researchers in the field of “musical expression”: Henry Shaffer, Eric F. Clarke, John Sloboda,Christhoper Longuet-Higgins, Johan Sundberg, Alf Gabrielsson (just to name a few European researchers), all of them contributed, along with quite a few fellow researchers all over the world, to an understanding on how "expressive nuances" in music performance make the difference between one and another performance. A recent paper by Luke Windsor (University of Leeds) summarizes and elaborates on this research. You might like it.

Windsor, W.L. et al. (2006). A structurally guided method for the decomposition of expression in music performance. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119(2), 1182. DOI: 10.1121/1.2146091

Why do we have music? (On music vs musicality)

Looking back on it, a returning question in this blog turns out to be: Why do we have music? And what is the point of studying it scientificly?

While it became quite popular to address such questions from an evolutionary perspective, there is still little support for the idea that music is an adaptation, that it makes you live longer, or that it makes one sexually more attractive. In fact, it made Steven Pinker position music as, at most, a byproduct of language:

As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless … music is quite different from language … it is a technology, not an adaptation (Pinker, 1997)

This statement —and the reference to music as ‘auditory cheesecake'— did not, as you can imagine, increase his popularity among music lovers. Nevertheless, he succeeded well in starting up a discussion under music scholars and cognitive scientists on why we have music and why it could be relevant for cognitive science to study music (e.g., Ashley et al, 2006; Zatorre, 2005).

In that respect, the archaeologist Steven Mithen did something you might have expected from a music scholar or cognitive scientist. In his book The Singing Neantherthals he presents a compelling story in support of the shared evolutionary origins of music and language. As the book title suggests, Mithen is particularly concerned with the Neanderthals, presenting them as intelligent and highly emotional individuals who communicated with a particularly musical version of Hmmmmm. (‘Hmmmm’ being Mithen's proposal for a musilanguage that might have preceded language and music).

In turn, Mithen’s book generated quite some discussion as well. In part because of the (impossible) question on what defines music, or, to be more precise, the important distinction between musicality and music. In a recent paper Mithen makes himself more clear:

The distinction I should have made explicit was between a ‘natural biologically based musicality’ and music as a culturally constructed phenomenon which builds upon that biological basis. So the musical ‘m’ in Hmmmmm ought to stand for the former — which had seemed quite obvious to me already — while the latter developed after Hmmmmm had bifurcated into music and language. Although I appreciate that the following have a culturally learnt component, I would describe bird song, whale song, primate vocalizations and baby babble as possessing musicality rather than being music.

Mithen, S., Morley, I., Wray, A., Tallerman, M., Gamble, C. (2006). The Singing Neanderthals: the Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body , by Steven Mithen. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005. ISBN 0-297-64317-7 hardback £20 & US$25.2; ix+374 pp.. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 16(01), 97. DOI: 10.1017/S0959774306000060

McDERMOTT, J., HAUSER, M. (2005). THE ORIGINS OF MUSIC: INNATENESS, UNIQUENESS, AND EVOLUTION. Music Perception, 23(1), 29-59. DOI: 10.1525/mp.2005.23.1.29

Does music facilitate language acquisition?

The latest issue of Cognition contains a brief, yet interesting study on the role of music in language acquisition. While several authors have shown that language learning can be modeled according to the statistical properties of syllable sentences, just a few studies showed that for musical information a similar case for statistical learning can be made.

Daniele Schön (Marseille, France) and collaborators show in their study that a group of French participants, with an average age of 23, do better in learning new words associated with distinct pitches –a melody- than those being spoken in monotonous fashion (In this case really monotonous since it was a speech synthesizer). The study is especially interesting in the context of research on infant-directed speech that turns out to be quite ‘musical’ (i.e. melody and rhythm play an important role), especially when compared to ‘real’ speech, as such indirectly supporting the idea that these musical aspects actually facilitate communication and learning in infants.

However, since only language learning was tested, it could not be shown that the participants relied more on musical than on linguistic information. An effect one could expect since several studies have shown that musical information can help in memorization and learning. While the authors were able to show that

“learning a new language, especially in the first learning phase wherein one needs to segment new words, may largely benefit of the motivational and structuring properties of music in song”

unfortunately —because of the experimental design used— no conclusion can be drawn about whether learners rely more on musical or linguistic information. What could be shown was that linguistic information took precedence over musical statistical cues. I would have expected the opposite, like it was found in infant studies.

SCHON, D., BOYER, M., MORENO, S., BESSON, M., PERETZ, I., KOLINSKY, R. (2008). Songs as an aid for language acquisition. Cognition, 106(2), 975-983. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2007.03.005

A sense for rhythm? (Part 3)

Last week quite a few people participated in an informal listening test on rhythm. It gratefully used some of the stimuli from a study by Hannon and Trehub (H&T).*

H&T studied the sensitivity of listeners to detect violations of rhythmic structure in simple meters (i.e. duple and triple meter; such as a march or waltz) and more complex meters (i.e. compound meter, such as 5/8 and 7/8, common to, e.g., Balkan music).
N.B. Last week’s fragment 1 was an example of a stimulus in a simple meter, fragment 2 was one in a complex meter (see earlier blog).

H&Ts study showed that North American participants judged the structure-violating music examples (e.g., the A-fragments in last weeks blog) as less similar to the original version than the structure-preserving ones (e.g., the B-fragments), but only so for the examples is simple meter (Fragment 1 in the earlier blog).

In a second experiment they showed that participants of Bulgarian or Macedonian origin could spot the rhythmic violations in both complex and simple-meter contexts. Arguably, because complex meters are more common in Balkan music. As such this is evidence for an effect of exposure or enculturation on rhythmic sensitivity. (Interestingly, the readers who did the test last week, performed quite similar to the Bulgarian participant group; But note: we did not replicate the study last week, it was just a demonstration).

An additional surprise of the H&T study was that 6-month-old infants (from North American origin), when exposed to the same stimuli, did as well in both metrical contexts: so very much like the Bulgarian adults. This is support for the idea that a sensitivity for rhythm and meter is actually active at an early age, and hinting that the North American participants lost some of these capabilities, instead of Balkan participants learning them. Of course, further research is needed to substantiate this, but the study is intriguing on its own.

Hannon, E.E., Trehub, S.E. (2005). Metrical Categories in Infancy and Adulthood. Psychological Science, 16(1), 48-55. DOI: 10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.00779.x

A sense for rhythm? (Part 2)

This week an informal listening test that might reveal something about your sense for rhythm. If you have a minute to spare, please continue reading and respond to the three questions below. The outcome might surprise you!

First, state whether you consider yourself having a sense for rhythm (N.B. you can be honest, the responses are recorded anonymously):


Then do the following two comparisons. First, listen to the following folksong (Fragment 1):

Fragment 1

Then compare Fragment 1A and 1B to 1, and decide which of the two is rhythmically dissimilar:

Fragment 1A
Fragment 1B

Then listen to Fragment 2:

Fragment 2
And finally, compare Fragment 2A and 2B to 2, and decide which of the two is rhythmically dissimilar?

Fragment 2A
Fragment 2B

These examples are taken from a study by Hannon and Trehub published in Psychological Science.* There is at least one surprising results presented in that study. For now, please do the informal experiment, and I will tell more about the results next week. [see here]

Erin E. Hannon, Sandra E. Trehub (2005) Metrical Categories in Infancy and Adulthood. Psychological Science 16 (1), 48–55. DOI: 10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.00779.x

What should a listening machine be able to do?

This week we'll have a kick-off meeting preparing for our project Zonder luisteraar geen muziek [No music without a listener] that has been nominated for the Dutch Academic Year Prize.

One of the questions the UvA-team (consisting of Vivienne Aerts, Shane Burmania, Olivia Ladinig, and me) will brainstorm about is: Imagine what a listening machine would look like, a machine that is able to listen and react in a human and musical way. What should such a machine know, what should it listen for, how could it respond, and how can we compare and evaluate such machines? One of the challenges is how to turn such a question into a compelling and fun problem to think about, aimed at students that want to combine their interest in music with a liberal arts and sciences education.

While it might look like a simple question, the design of a 'listening machine' that embodies the musical and listening skills common to most humans turns out to be a full-fledged research program, and it is part of the scientific enterprise generally known as music cognition. In this field of research computational modeling (formalizing a theory in the form of a computer program and relating it to human behavior) is an influential methodology that has contributed to a further understanding of music as a process in which the performer and the listener play a central role.

While for a long time music was a topic hidden away under subject headings like 'pitch' and 'time perception' in scientific reference books, in recent years several disciplines, ranging from the humanities to the social and natural sciences, show a growing interest in the scientific study of music. A recent example is Robert Zatorre who promotes music as “the food of neuroscience” (see Nature). It looks like the beginning of something ...

'Zonder luisteraar geen muziek?'

This weekend the music cognition group from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) will be officially nominated for the Academische Jaarprijs, an initiative of the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad and two scientific organizations (NWO and KNAW) to promote the dissemination and popularization of science. The UvA-team will participate with the project proposal ‘Zonder luisteraar geen muziek’ ['No Music without a listener'].*

The aim of the UvA-project is to show that we all have a talent for music. While some people might think they have no sense for rhythm or claim not to be able to sing a melody in tune, most of us do appreciate music and are perfectly capable of distinguishing between one performance or another. In other words, we will stress the musical competence of the average listener (as opposed to musical competence associated with musicianship).

The nominated communication plan aims to design an interactive website that allows listeners to test their musical listening capabilities (based on research by our group and that of authors like Bigand, Dalla Bella, Hannon, Peretz and Schellenberg). Participants might be surprised of what they are able to hear!

* See special issue of NRC Handelsblad