Can we borrow your ears?

Fleur Bouwer, from the Music Cognition Group at the University of Amsterdam, traveled to Canada a few weeks ago to start-up an ambitious experiment on rhythm perception in collaboration with the group of Jessica Grahn, the Music Neuroscience Lab at Western University in London, Ontario. In preparation for a larger fMRI study she invites listeners to join an online pilot study. Interested?

The study involves listening to and rating rhythms online. The entire study will take up to 1 hour to complete and you can participate at a time and location of your convenience. You can also take the experiment in short blocks and take breaks in between. To participate, you need a computer with an Internet connection and loudspeakers or headphones.

The online experiment can be found at this link.

A Brazilian bird singing like Mozart?

About a week ago the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant published an article with the title 'Braziliaanse vogel zingt een lied van het niveau Mozart' ('Brazilian bird sings a song of Mozart-level quality'). Several friends send me links via the social media (Thanks, keep on doing that!) because of my interest in what makes us musical animals. Is this striking new evidence? Or another case of anthropomorphism?

Well, let's first listen to a recording of the bird under discussion: the musician wren (Cyphorhinus arada).



Many studies on the origins of music concern the question of what defines music. Can birdsong be considered music? In trying to answer this question, it is important to separate the notions of ‘music’ and ‘musicality’, with musicality being defined 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.

However, it is still a challenge to demarcate precisely what 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.

Other studies are concerned with thinking about the question what we share with other animals in terms of musicality. And indeed, no matter how we would like it to be different, we are repeatedly reminded that we have more similarities to nonhuman animals than differences. However, we must be careful in calling birdsong music. We make this mistake more often. We, the human listeners, perceive the sounds made by songbirds as music. Whether these other animals also do that is unclear. And that makes a world of difference.

Musician wren (Cyphorhinus arada)

The study mentioned about a week ago in the Volkskrant was published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, a relatively new online journal promoting collaborations between the humanities and the sciences (N.B. dated Spring 2012).

If you read the paper, you will see that the authors confirm earlier findings that were discussed on this blog as well. For instance, the study that appeared in Animal Behavior (Araya-Salas, 2012) on the song of a nightingale wren, a species belonging to the same family as the musician wren. In that study ecologist Marcelo Araya-Salas (New Mexico State University) shows that the resemblance between a nightingale wren's song and music is nothing more than a coincidence. In the Doolittle & Brumm (2012) study similar results are reported. They also conclude that it is because 'human listeners from a variety of musical cultures are used to hearing these intervals as frames or anchors, we are likely to perceive many passages of musician wren songs not as series of disjunct notes but as musical units.' (Doolittle & Brumm, 2012:80).

Despite the beauty of birdsong, it’s again an example that when we call something music we’re projecting our own biases. Nothing wrong with that at all, but good to realize.

Nevertheless, from a scientific perspective, one way of avoiding this common pitfall is to focus on the actual, far more challenging question: is it music to them? (cf. Honing, 2013). More on that later...

Doolittle, E.  & Brumm, H. (2012). O Canto do Uirapuru: Consonant intervals and patterns in the song of the musician wren. Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies, 6 (1), 55-85. [online advance publication 15 October 2013]

 Araya-Salas, M. (2012). Is birdsong music? Evaluating harmonic intervals in songs of a Neotropical songbird Animal Behaviour, 84 (2), 309-313. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.04.038

Honing, H. (2013). Op zoek naar wat ons muzikale dieren maakt. Free iBook (voorpublicatie).

P.S. In the context of earlier discussions on tuning systems (e.g., see earlier  blog entry): this study suggests that we might actually not be so sensitive to tuning as we might think.

Can't get it out of your head?

Imagine listening to a catchy tune. When do you nod your head and sing along? That's the hook, the most memorable part of the song, crafted by songwriters to stick in your head and exploited by DJs to get people onto the dance floor. Everyone knows a hook when they hear it, but scientists don't know why.

#Hooked was launched this week at Manchester Science Festival and will run until September 2014. During the Festival people can contribute their catchiest songs and stories to build the playlist and scientists will debate the science of what makes music catchy, from hooks, to earworms and hit songs. There will be a silent disco and shows about music with ‘Captain Hooked’ (see website for more details). Nominations for the playlist (which runs across all musical genres) will continue in the run up to the launch of the #Hooked game in early 2014.



#Hooked is an ambitious initiative of Dr Erinma Ochu, funded by a Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellowship. She did an amazing job in bringing lots of people together as well as initiating a series of activities at the Manchester Science Museum around the simple idea of finding out what makes music catchy, an idea with a potential outreach far beyond that of basic music cognition research. The hooked-game will be launched in the Spring of 2014. And, if you can't wait, you can do the Hooked questionaire here or nominate your favorite song here.

Why does this matter? Well, the experiment is all about musical memory and as such might provide insights into long term memory and even failing memory, which could contribute to future Alzheimer's disease research. See video below for further motivation:



Click here to Participate!

Managing your talents?

Keynote by Dan Levitin

On August 29 and 30, 2013 the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, the University of Amsterdam, and VU University will organize the Managing Your Talents conference. This conference makes for a unique gathering of people whose expertise will be called upon to achieve a new standard of educational excellence in the performing arts. It is a must-go for those who are involved with music, dance or theatre, and who seek to share their interest with researchers from a broad range of disciplines, such as performing arts pedagogy, medicine, neuropsychology, brain and cognition sciences, and human motion sciences.

The keynote lecture will be given by Daniel Levitin (professor of psychology and behavioural neuroscience, McGill University, Montréal), Other speakers at this conference include Eckart Altenmüller (music and medicine), Roger Kneebone (surgical education), Erik Scherder (neuropsychology), Susan Hallam (music psychology and education), and Jacques van Rossum (human motion sciences). The participants will also see examples of teaching and training practices at professional art schools.

Roger Kneebone at TEDMEDLive

Updates on the program will follow at intervals this summer, and will be made available at the conference website: Managing Your Talents. 

(Zie Folia voor een aankondiging in het Nederlands.)

What’s happening in the field music cognition?

The biennial meeting of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC) will be held from 8-11 August 2013 at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. This years edition looks like it will be one of the largest if not the largest meetings of SMPC to date.*

If you want to have a look at the program with four parallel tracks and an impressive poster program, the website now hosts a beautiful designed booklet (by Lisa Liskovoi) with an overview of all the papers and posters that will be presented across four days. Download it here.

If you are interested in a lively report during the conference: Vicky Williamson, who you might remember from her blog at ICMPC12, announced to be the blogger of the SMPC as well. Quite a task! Follow it here.

*The organizers were prompted to put it in precise numbers: "The 191 scheduled talks this year represents roughly double the historical norm of roughly 95 (based on metrics from the past 3 meetings). The posters story is similar– 94 here relative to an average of about 60 previously.  We also have a special symposium on music therapy, which I think will be a great addition, as it will help to strengthen our ties with this important research discipline.  This also explains why we had to go with a 4 track structure and 3 posters sessions, which are a lot based on our historical norms."

Interested in music gaming and software development?

We are looking for a researcher with experience in iOS development who can help us explore the question of 'what makes music catchy?' with an innovative music quiz game. For more information and detailed instructions on how to apply see here. Deadline for applications is 15 August 2013.

Burgoyne, J. A., Bountouridis. D., Balen, J. van, & Honing, H. (in press). Hooked: A game for discovering what makes music catchy. Proceedings of ISMIR. Curitiba, Brasil.

In for a discount?

I hope you don't mind that -in the middle of the summer- I do another plug of my book that is about to appear in paperback and offered at 50% discount until Thursday 18 July 2013.

However, from now on, be sure to expect mostly updates on research by colleagues. As a start, below a reference to an intriguing paper by Dan Dediu and Stephen C. Levinson that just came out in Frontiers in Language Sciences on the evolutionary history of language, with a single, yet inspiring paragraph on music.

Dediu, D. & Levinson, S.C.  (2013) On the antiquity of language: the reinterpretation of Neandertal linguistic capacities and its consequences. Frontiers in Language Sciences. 4, 397.

What's new on music, language and the brain?

From 8-12 May 2011 about forty researchers were asked to join a week of discussions in Frankfurt am Main, Germany in the context of the Ernst Strüngmann Forum.

The Forum can best be imagined as an intellectual retreat. A group of international experts are brought together for a week to identify gaps in knowledge; key questions are posed and innovative ways of filling these gaps are sought. To complete the communication process, the Ernst Strüngmann Forum publishes the results in partnership with MIT Press.

The 2011 Forum explored the relationships between language, music, and the brain by pursuing four key themes and the crosstalk among them: 1) song and dance as a bridge between music and language, 2) multiple levels of structure from brain to behavior to culture, 3) the semantics of internal and external worlds and the role of emotion, and 4) the evolution and development of language.

See more information on the resulting book at MIT Press.

Interested in becoming a student assistant at MCG?

 

The Music Cognition Group (MCG) searches for an enthusiastic and well-organized personal assistant (PA) for the Academic Year 2013/14. For more information and detailed instructions on how to apply see here. Deadline for applications is 01 July 2013.

Does music make you move?

At TEDxWaterloo 2013 Jessica Grahn – a cognitive neuroscientist working at Western University, Canada – presented an engaging talk about why music moves us, and why picking up the beat might make us unique.




And another video just to ilustrate the point:



N.B. See below some of the studies mentioned in the talk.

Grahn, J., & Brett, M. (2007). Rhythm and Beat Perception in Motor Areas of the Brain Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19 (5), 893-906 DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2007.19.5.893

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

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