Visiting Plymouth, UK this weekend?

The last few weeks I wrote little or no entries mainly because of the overwhelming amount of paper work that comes with finalizing a European research project :-) Nevertheless, the end of the EmCAP project (Sixth Framework, IST) is celebrated this weekend in Plymouth, UK with a public symposium.

This symposium, named Music, Science and the Brain, will discuss the latest scientific contributions to our understanding of how the brain processes music and how this understanding contributes to the development of new technologies for the music industry.

Speakers include all principal investigators of the European EmCAP Project and a number of invited scientists, such as David Huron (Ohio State University, USA), Stefan Koelsch (University of Sussex, UK), Lauren Stewart (Goldsmiths College, UK), Roy Patterson (University fo Cambridge, UK) and Petri Toiviainen (University Jyvaskyla, Finland).

De do do do, de da da da?

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 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, a slower tempo, and more rhythmic variation. A kind of ‘musilanguage’ indeed.

IDS 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, like Chinese. Hence, it is 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 more likely that language makes use of faculties special to music then that it emerged as a side effect of language (as as suggested once by a well-known cognitive psychologist).

Laurel J. Trainor, Caren M. Austin, Renee N. Desjardins (2000). Is Infant-Directed Speech Prosody a Result of the Vocal Expression of Emotion? Psychological Science, 11 (3), 188-195 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9280.00240