Interested in a PhD fellowship in Amsterdam?

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) currently has a PhD fellowship available at the Faculty of Humanities starting on 1 September 2013. Applications are now invited from excellent candidates wishing to conduct research in an area in which either the Logic and Language group or the Language and Computation group at ILLC are active, such as the computational modeling of human information processing, especially natural language and music (LaCo) and/or foundational issues in mathematics and computer science (LoCo). For more information, see here. Deadline for applications is 14 January 2013.

Perfect Pitch: Is this for real?

Absolute Pitch (AP) or Perfect Pitch, as some prefer to call it, is common throughout the animal world, and dogs are no exception (Levitin & Rogers, 2005).*

However, the demonstration below is almost too good to be true. Is the dog like Clever Hans, picking up unconscious cuing, or is he indeed listening and converting the sounding pitches to key presses? 

My prediction: the dog primarily watches the eyes and other body movements of the trainer, and does not really listen. A curtain between the owner and the dog would confirm this.

Update Summer 2013: See below for a composition by Brechtje van Dijk broadcasted by Vrije Geluiden in May 2013, with the same two dogs. Look closely: they look carefully, but do they listen?

* N.B. Relative pitch is far more special, see earlier blogs.

Levitin, D., & Rogers, S. (2005). Absolute pitch: perception, coding, and controversies Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9 (1), 26-33 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2004.11.007

Can rhesus monkeys detect the beat in music?

Beat induction, the ability to pick up regularity – the beat – from a varying rhythm, is not an ability that rhesus monkeys possess. These are the findings of researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and our group in Amsterdam, which are published today in PLOS ONE.

It seems a trivial skill: children that clap along with a song, musicians that tap their foot to the music, or a stage full of line dancers that dance in synchrony. And in way, it is indeed trivial that most people can easily pick up a regular pulse from the music or judge whether the music speeds up or slows down. However, the realisation that perceiving this regularity in music allows us to dance and make music together makes it less trivial a phenomenon.

Previous research showed that not only adult humans, but also newborn babies can detect the beat in music. This proved that beat induction is congenital and can therefore not be learnt. In their experiments with rhesus monkeys, the researchers used the same stimuli and experimental paradigms from previous research conducted on humans and babies. They measured electrical brain signals using electrodes while the participants were listening.

These research results are in line with the vocal learning hypothesis, which suggests that only species who can mimic sounds share the ability of beat induction. These species include several bird and mammal species, although the ability to mimic sounds is only weakly developed, or missing entirely, in nonhuman primates.

In addition, the results support the dissociation hypothesis, which claims that there is a dissociation between rhythm perception and beat perception. This new research suggests that humans share rhythm perception (or duration-based timing) with other primates, while beat induction (or beat-based timing) is only present in specific species (including humans and a selected group of bird species), arguably as a result of convergent evolution.


Honing, H., Merchant, H., Háden, G., Prado, L., & Bartolo, R. (2012). Rhesus Monkeys (Macaca mulatta) Detect Rhythmic Groups in Music, but Not the Beat PLoS ONE, 7 (12) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0051369

Hebben apen maatgevoel? (Deel 2) [Dutch]

Fragment uit 'Op zoek naar wat ons muzikale dieren maakt':

"Leipzig, 15 juli 2011. Op het Max Planck Instituut in Leipzig woon ik de internationale Ritme, Perceptie en Productie Workshop (RPPW) bij. Het is een relatief kleine, tweejaarlijkse bijeenkomst waar zo’n dertig onderzoekers uit verschillende disciplines bij elkaar komen om het over ritme en verschillende ritmische activiteiten te hebben, zoals roeien, golfen, lopen, spreken en muziek maken. Het is voor mij een bijzondere workshop. Ik bezocht hem als student voor het eerst in 1988, en de onderzoekers die ik daar ontmoette (o.a. Christopher Longuet-Higgins en Eric Clarke) maakten destijds een onuitwisbare indruk op me. Door hun passie en fascinerende onderzoek wist ik dat ik ook de wetenschap in wilde. Sindsdien heb ik nagenoeg alle RPPW bijeenkomsten bijgewoond.

Aan het conferentiediner zit ik naast Hugo Merchant, een energieke Mexicaan die de dag ervoor een lezing gaf over zijn recente onderzoek naar de representatie van tijd en ritme in de hersenen. Een geavanceerd verhaal met verrassende uitkomsten: in de hersenen blijken verschillende soorten timers traceerbaar te zijn. De hersenen van resusaapjes wel te verstaan, die in dit onderzoek als model dienen voor de hersenen van mensen. Hugo liet zien dat bij resusaapjes specifieke hersencellen actief zijn bij het aftellen totdat er iets moet gebeuren en bij cellen die de verstreken tijd meten nadat er iets is gebeurd.

Gedurende de avond praten we uitgebreid over de interpretatie en allerhande consequenties van de resultaten, zoals het schatten van tijd, het idee van een mentale klok (centraal dan wel gedistribueerd over de hersenen) en het mogelijke verschil tussen interval-gebaseerde timing (het herkennen van ritmes) en beat-gebaseerde timing (het herkennen van regelmaat).

Op een gegeven moment vraag ik Hugo op de man af: denk je dat het mogelijk is om bij resusaapjes een EEG te meten? That’s an empirical question, antwoordt hij uitdagend. En nadat we er nog wat langer over hebben gepraat, zegt hij: Let’s do it!"

A.s. zondag, in de uitzending van Vpro's Vrije Geluiden, meer over het onderzoek naar maatgevoel bij resusaapjes.

Do music and language share the same resources?

The interest in the relationship between music and language is a long-standing one. While Lerdahl & Jackendoff in their seminal book on the generative theory of tonal music built mostly on insights of metrical phonology of the time, more recent studies draw attention to the parallels with current minimalist syntactic theory rather than phonology. However, there are compelling reasons to consider music and language as two distinct cognitive systems. Recent findings in the neuroscience of music suggest that music is likely a cognitively unique and evolutionary distinct faculty (e.g., Peretz & Colheart 2003). This is referred to as the modularity-hypothesis.

This position can be contrasted with the resource-sharing hypothesis that suggests music and language share processing mechanisms, especially those of a syntactic nature, and that they are just distinct in terms of the lexicon used (Patel 2003). For this hypothesis there is now quite some evidence (see, e.g., Slevc et al., 2009). That study showed enhanced syntactic garden path effects when the sentences were paired with syntactically unexpected chords, whereas the musical manipulation had no reliable effect on the processing of semantic violations.

However, last week a new study was published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (Perruchet & Poulin-Charronnat, 2012) that not only replicated the results of the former study, but also tested semantic garden paths, with – surprisingly – similar effects. The researchers suggest that the mechanism that might in fact underpin these interactions is the ‘garden path configuration’, rather than the implication of an alleged syntactic module (as is suggested by the resource-sharing hypothesis). It might well be that a different amount of attentional resources is recruited to process the linguistic manipulations and as such modulating the resources left available for the processing of music.

 Perruchet P, & Poulin-Charronnat B (2012). Challenging prior evidence for a shared syntactic processor for language and music. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review PMID: 23180417

Peretz, I., & Coltheart, M. (2003). Modularity of music processing Nature Neuroscience, 6 (7), 688-691 DOI: 10.1038/nn1083

Patel, A. (2003). Language, music, syntax and the brain Nature Neuroscience, 6 (7), 674-681 DOI: 10.1038/nn1082
 

Hebben apen maatgevoel? [Dutch]

Elf maanden geleden werd de documentaire De man zonder ritme uitgezonden door het wetenschapsprogramma Labyrint van de VPRO / NTR:



Over enkele weken zal over het onderzoek, dat in de documentaire aan de orde kwam, een boekje verschijnen dat de zoektocht naar ritme- en maatgevoel bij mensen en apen beschrijft. Het essay, geschreven n.a.v. de 12e Van Foreest Publiekslezing in Alkmaar, beschrijft een recentelijk ingezette zoektocht over de vraag wat ons muzikale dieren maakt. Wat is er te zeggen over de oorsprong van muziek en muzikaliteit vanuit een biologisch en evolutionair perspectief? Hoe is muziek ontstaan? Is muziek uniek voor mensen, zoals taal dat lijkt te zijn? En zo niet, welke muzikale vaardigheden delen we dan met andere primaten?

Daarnaast verschijnt er binnenkort een gerelateerd wetenschappelijk artikel in PLoS ONE. De uitkomst moet nog even geheim gehouden worden (van PLoS ONE), maar ik kan wel zeggen dat wat ik, ten tijde van de opnames, dacht dat de meest waarschijnlijke uitkomst zou zijn, uiteindelijk het minst waarschijnlijk blijkt.

Honing, H. (2012, te verschijnen). Op zoek naar wat ons muzikale dieren maakt. Nieuw Amsterdam Uitgevers.

What's new in Music Cognition and Cognitive Science?

In the latest issue of Topics in Cognitive Science (edited by Martin Rohrmeier and Patrick Rebuschat) Marcus Pearce and Martin Rohrmeier write in the introduction:

"Why should music be of interest to cognitive scientists, and what role does it play in human cognition? We review three factors that make music an important topic for cognitive scientific research. First, music is a universal human trait fulfilling crucial roles in everyday life. Second, music has an important part to play in ontogenetic development and human evolution. Third, appreciating and producing music simultaneously engage many complex perceptual, cognitive, and emotional processes, rendering music an ideal object for studying the mind. We propose an integrated status for music cognition in the Cognitive Sciences and conclude by reviewing challenges and big questions in the field and the way in which these reflect recent developments."

Pearce M, & Rohrmeier M (2012). Music cognition and the cognitive sciences. Topics in cognitive science, 4 (4), 468-84 PMID: 23060125

Interested in a PhD or Postdoc position?

As of today, Leiden University, University of Amsterdam, and the Meertens Institute are looking for several PhD and Postdoc candidates for an ambitious research project starting February 1, 2013.

(See links below on those related to music cognition.)

In various domains of cognitive science, a new paradigm holds that humans and non-human animals are born with a small set of hard-wired cognitive abilities that are task-specific, language-independent, and non-species-specific. These core knowledge systems are innate cognitive skills that have the capacity for building mental representations of objects, persons, spatial relationships, numerosity, and social interaction. In addition to core knowledge systems, humans possess species-specific, uniquely human abilities such as language and music.

The ‘core knowledge’ paradigm challenges scholars in the humanities to ask the question how nurture and culture build on nature. This project examines the way in which innate, non specifically human, core knowledge systems for object representation, number, and geometry constrain cultural expressions in music, language, and the visual arts. In this research program, four domains of the humanities will be investigated from the point of view of core knowledge:

Subproject 1:  Music Cognition        
PhD & Postdoc, teamleader: Prof.dr H. Honing

Subproject 2:  Language and Number              
PhD & Postdoc, teamleader: Prof.dr S. Barbiers

Subproject 3:  Visual Arts and Geometry
PhD & Postdoc, teamleaders: Prof.dr.ir M. Delbeke & Prof.dr.ir C. van Eck

Subproject 4:  Poetry, Rhythm, and Meter
PhD & Postdoc, teamleader: Prof.dr M. van Oostendorp

Deadline for applications: 23 November 2012.

For more information see research proposal.

See also related entries. 

A new vocal learner found?

'Singing' male mouse.

In a recent study by Timothy Holy and Zhongsheng Guo (Washington University) it was suggested that male mice produce vocalizations that are songlike, in the sense that they have a melodic structure, sequential and repetitive use of ‘syllables’ (as opposed to what can be called ‘calls’) that are combined in a non-random fashion with repeated motifs. And all this in the ultrasonic domain.

Example of a male adult mouse song (from Arriaga et al, 2012).

This discovery opened the question of whether mice share any behavioral and neural mechanisms for song production and learning with the set of rare vocal learning species, which includes three groups of birds (songbirds, parrots, hummingbirds) and several groups of mammals (humans, cetaceans [dolphins and whales], bats, elephants, and pinnipeds [sea lions and seals]).

In a study that appeared in PLoS ONE two days ago, co-authored by Gustavo Arriaga, Eric Zhou and Erich Jarvis (Duke University), it was shown that a motor cortex region in mice is active during singing, and that it projects directly to brainstem vocal motor neurons that is necessary for keeping song more stereotyped and on pitch.

The Jarvis research team also discovered that the mice depend on auditory feedback to maintain some ultrasonic song features, and that sub-strains with differences in their songs can match each other’s pitch when cross-housed under competitive social conditions.

It was concluded that male mice have some limited vocal modification abilities with at least some neuroanatomical features thought to be unique to humans and song-learning birds. In short: vocal learning seems not so much a species-specific characteristic, present in three groups of birds and several groups of mammals, but more likely to be a continuum.

Holy TE, & Guo Z (2005). Ultrasonic songs of male mice. PLoS biology, 3 (12) PMID: 16248680

Arriaga, G., Zhou, E. P., & Jarvis, E. D. (2012). Of Mice, Birds, and Men: The Mouse Ultrasonic Song-system Has Some Features SImilar to Humans and Song-Learning Birds PLoS ONE, 7 (10) : 10.1371/journal.pone.0046610

Is birdsong music?

Nightingale wrens (by John G. Keulemans)

Many studies on the origins 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? 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 or a chimpanzee’s drumming on an empty barrel, music. We make this mistake more often. We, the human listeners, perceive the sounds made by songbirds, whales, or chimpanzees as music. Whether these other animals also do that is unclear. And that makes a world of difference.

A few weeks ago an interesting study appeared in Animal Behavior on the often used example of the song of a nightingale that can be considered to be impressively musical. In that study ecologist Marcelo Araya-Salas (New Mexico State University in Las Cruces) shows that the resemblance between a nightingale wren's song and music is nothing more than a coincidence. Out of the 243 comparisons Araya-Salas made between nightingale wrens' songs and musical scales, only six matched harmonic intervals. 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.

 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

Rothenberg, D. (2005). Why Birds Sing: A Journey through the Mystery of Birdsong. New York : Basic Books.

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

Can the domains of Music Cognition and Music Information Retrieval inform each other?

In about a weeks time the 13th ISMIR (International Society for Music Information Retrieval) conference will be held. This is a conference on the processing, searching, organizing and accessing music-related data. It attracts a research community that is intrigued by the revolution in music distribution and storage brought about by digital technology which generated quite some research activity and interest in academia as well as in industry.

In this discipline, referred to as Music Information Retrieval (or MIR for short), the topic is not so much to understand and model music (like in the field of music cognition), but to design robust and effective methods to locate and retrieve musical information, including tasks like query-by-humming, music recommendation, music recognition, and genre classification.

A common approach in MIR research is to use information-theoretic models to extract information from the musical data, be it the audio recording itself or all kinds of meta-data, such as artist or genre classification. With advanced machine learning techniques, and the availability of so-called ‘ground truth’ data (i.e., annotations made by experts that the algorithm uses to decide on the relevance of the results for a certain query), a model of retrieving relevant musical information is constructed. Overall, this approach is based on the assumption that all relevant information is present in the data and that it can, in principle, be extracted from that data (data-oriented approach).

Several alternatives have been proposed, such as models based on perception-based signal processing or mimetic and gesture-based queries. However, with regard to the cognitive aspects of MIR (the perspective of the listener), some information might be implicit or not present at all in the data. Especially in the design of similarity measures (e.g., ‘search for songs that sound like X’) it becomes clear quite quickly that not all required information is present in the data. Elaborating state-of-the-art MIR techniques with recent findings from music cognition seems therefore a natural next step in improving (exploratory) search engines for music and audio (cognition-based approach) (cf. Honing, 2010).

A creative paper, discussing the differences and overlaps between the two fields in dialog form, is about to appear in the proceedings of the upcoming ISMIR conference. Emanuel Bigand –a well-known music cognition researcher–, and Jean-Julien Aucouturier –MIR researcher–, wrote a fictitious dialog:

“Mel is a MIR researcher (the audio type) who's always been convinced that his field of research had something to contribute to the study of music cognition. His feeling, however, hasn't been much shared by the reviewers of the many psychology journals he tried submitting his views to. Their critics, rejecting his data as irrelevant, have frustrated him - the more he tried to rebut, the more defensive both sides of the debate became. He was close to give up his hopes of interdisciplinary dialog when, in one final and desperate rejection letter, he sensed an unusual touch of interest in the editor's response. She, a cognitive psychologist named Ann, was clearly open to discussion. This was the opportunity that Mel had always hoped for: clarifying what psychologists really think of audio MIR, correcting misconceptions that he himself made about cognition, and maybe, developing a vision of how both fields could work together. The following is the imaginary dialog that ensued. Meet Dr Mel Cepstrum, the MIR researcher, and Prof. Ann Ova, the psychologist.”

Aucouturier, J., & Bigand, E. (2012). Mel Cepstrum & Ann Ova: The Difficult Dialog Between MIR and Music Cognition. Proceedings of the 13th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, 397-402.

Honing, H. (2010). Lure(d) into listening: The potential of cognition-based music information retrieval. Empirical Musicology Review, 5(4), 121-126.  

Volk. A., & Honingh, A. (eds) (2012). Special Issue: Mathematical and Computational Approaches to Music: Three Methodological Reflections Journal of Mathematics and Music, 6 (2). 10.1080/17459737.2012.704154

A case of congenital beat deafness? [revisited]

Mathieu, apparently lacking a sense of beat.

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 was pretty sure she found a 'beat-deaf' person. I couldn’t but share her enthusiasm. In Phillips-Silver et al. (2011) Peretz and her team wrote:

'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.'

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) initiated an EEG/ERP experiment, modeled after our earlier Amsterdam experiments, to directly probe Mathieu’s apparent beat-deafness.

Last winter, just a few weeks after the experiments, we had a teleconference discussing the first experimental results (filmed by a Dutch TV crew following our work). The first results suggested 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. And the results will hopefully be published later this year.

See below for some fragments from the teleconference:



For more the documentary De man zonder ritme, see the website of NPO3.

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

Zijn wij muzikale dieren? [Dutch]

Fragment uit Folia (door Marieke Buijs):

"Henkjan Honing heeft een missie: ‘Ik ga u ervan overtuigen dat u muzikaler bent dan u zelf denkt.’ Het Glazen huis der Wetenschap zit bomvol en ook buiten staan de toeschouwers rijendik opgesteld. Bij aanvang van het college vraagt Honing, hoogleraar cognitieve en computationele muziekwetenschap, wie zichzelf amuzikaal vindt. Ongeveer de helft van de aanwezigen steekt zijn hand op. Maar Honing vertelt dat slechts vier procent van de mensen daadwerkelijk geen gevoel voor muziek heeft. Aan de hand van een aantal geluidsfragmenten toont Honing de aanwezigen dat ze wel degelijk muzikaal zijn en beschikken over een relatief gehoor en gevoel voor ritme [..]."


Een videoverslag van het minicollege is hier te vinden.

Interested in current research in music cognition?

As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, two weeks ago a successful edition of the ICMPC/ESCOM conference was held in Thessaloniki, Greece.

The ICMPC is an international conference on music cognition that was this year ambitiously put together –and not without risk– by Emilios Cambouropoulos and his colleagues. Despite the difficult times for Greece it turned out to be a great success in terms of the number of participants that attended and the quality of the presentations.

If you are interested in what the current topics and issues are in the field of music cognition, you might find the reviews by researcher Vicky Williamson (Goldsmiths, University of London)  helpful. She just released them as an e-book – about 40 pages of blog entries! As you will see, they give a lively impression of the conference through a personal and engaging selection of the five parallel sessions and four keynotes that made up the elaborate program. A wonderful contribution!

Williamson, V. (2012). ICMPC – ESCOM 2012: The Blogs. E-book. http://www.gold.ac.uk/media/e-book.pdf

Is music a result of sexual selection? [Revisited]

Cover of NRC Cultureel Supplement.

It was Darwin’s hunch: music, as widespread as it is in our human culture, could well be a result of sexual selection, one of the two selection mechanisms he proposed to be at the basis of our evolution (the other being natural selection).

Today an article by Wim Köhler appeared in the Dutch newspaper NRC elaborating on this idea: the potential evolutionary advantage of ‘mooizingers’ - those who perform well musically.

Music as a result of sexual selection has been adapted by psychologist Geoffrey Miller in his often cited book The Mating Mind, in which he suggests music to be one of the many social and cultural behaviors that we use to impress the opposite sex. At first it seems convincing idea…

However, there is a lot to bring in against this hypothesis (see earlier blogs). The most striking being simply the absence of empirical evidence! (The only evidence that Miller brought forward was the amount of offspring Jimi Hendrix produced - officially three!?)

Cognitive biologist Tecumseh Fitch (Vienna University) and his colleagues recently designed an experiment to put the sexual selection hypothesis to the test: does the ability to produce complex musical sounds  reflect qualities that are relevant in mate choice contexts, supporting the idea of music to be functionally analogous to the sexually-selected acoustic displays of some animals, such as songbirds? If this hypothesis is correct, women may be expected to show heightened preferences for more complex music when they are most fertile -- was the reasoning of the Vienna research team.

To to test this hypothesis the Vienna team used computer-generated musical pieces and ovulation predictor kits. The researchers found that women prefer more complex music in general, but they found no evidence that their preference for more complex music increased around ovulation. As such these findings are not consistent with the hypothesis that a heightened preference/bias in women for more complex music around ovulation could have played a role in the evolution of music.

More empirical research is needed of course, but for the time being and considering the empirical evidence that is available, there is no study, as yet, that supports the sexual selection hypothesis for music.

Charlton, Benjamin D., Filippi, Piera, & Fitch, W. Tecumseh (2012). Do Women Prefer More Complex Music around Ovulation? PLoS ONE, 7 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0035626

Honing, H., & Ploeger, A. (2012). Cognition and the Evolution of Music: Pitfalls and Prospects Topics in Cognitive Science. DOI: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01210.x

Zomertijd? [Dutch]

Volkskrant |  8 augustus 2012

Volledige interview is te vinden op de website van de Volkskrant of hier.

Sauna- en liftmuziek? [Dutch]

[Deze week een luchtige zomer-entry -- volgende week weer serieuze wetenschap]

Afgelopen dinsdag nodigde mijn broer, Yuri Honing, mij uit voor een aflevering van zijn radioprogramma op Radio 6: een zender die zich profileert op het gebied van Jazz & Soul. 

Hij belde me een week daarvoor op met het verzoek simpelweg een stapel CDs mee te nemen.  Onmogelijke opdracht natuurlijk. Zeker voor een familie waarin in muziek het hoogste van het hoogste is. Het resulteerde in dagen lang zoeken naar fragmenten die 'kunnen', 'zouden kunnen' of 'helemaal niet kunnen'. 

Uiteindelijk had ik achtien cd's (cq. iTunes aankopen) geselecteerd, allemaal live opnames.  Maar daarvan kwam natuurlijk maar een fractie in de uitzending terecht, vooral omdat zich tijdens de avond allerlei uitgesproken en onuitgesproken fascinaties en associaties opdrongen. Een avondje muziekluisteren dus, zoals we dat wel vaker doen, en met veel plezier. Hieronder een fragment:

Interested in what's happening at ICMPC 12?

Vicky Williamson from Goldsmiths is a very active blogger on music cognition (besides being a creative researcher). If you want to follow what's currently happening at the ICMPC in Thessaloniki, Greece, see her wonderful blog at musicpsychology.co.uk. Almost every day a new entry appears on a selection of the five parallel sessions on a wide variety of topics related to music cognition and perception.

Is replication an issue in music cognition?

This week the 12th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC) is being held in Thessaloniki, Greece. A week long hunderds of researchers will present their latest work in a dense program with five parallel sessions and four keynotes. Slightly overdone perhaps, but it shows the still growing and international interest in music cognition as a research topic.

On the first day there will be a symposium on 'Replication'. By way of introduction below a blog entry that was originally published in May 2010:

"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 & 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.

Simmons, Joseph P., Nelson, Leif D., & Simonsohn, Uri (2011). False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant Psychological Science DOI: 10.1177/0956797611417632

What about the what, how, and where of auditory perception?

The last few days the 2nd Auditory Cognition Summer School was held in Plymouth, UK. Thirty enthusiastic students from a variety of backgrounds spent time (and still do so until tomorrow afternoon)  attending lectures, work groups and demonstrations is this new, emerging field.

Personally, I was quite impressed by the presentation of prof. Sophie Kertu Scott (UCL) yesterday. She discussed her work on speech perception, as well as her recent work on the neurobiology of audition. While I know her work from quite a while ago (RPPW 1994), she since then emerged as a true expert in the neuroscience of speech perception, situating our understanding of speech, space and auditory objects in the context of the basic neuroanatomy of the primate auditory system.

See a relative recent paper below, one that emphasizes the putative directions of the ‘what’,‘where’ and ‘how’ streams of processing in the human brain.

Scott, Sophie K. (2005). Auditory processing — speech, space and auditory objects. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 15, 197-201. DOI: 10.1016/j.conb.2005.03.009

What makes us musical animals?

From the ScienceDaily, July 6, 2012:

“In a forthcoming issue of Topics in Cognitive Science researchers from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) argue that at least two, seemingly trivial musical skills can be considered fundamental to the evolution of music: relative pitch -- the skill to recognise a melody independent of its pitch level -- and beat induction -- the skill to pick up regularity (the beat) from a varying rhythm. Both are considered cognitive mechanisms that are essential to perceive, make and appreciate music, and, as such, could be argued to be conditional to the origin of music.

While it recently became quite popular to address the study of the origins of music from an evolutionary perspective, there is still little agreement on the idea that music is in fact an adaptation, that it influenced our survival, or that it made us sexually more attractive. Music appears to be of little use. It doesn't quell our hunger, nor do we live a day longer because of it. So why argue that music is an adaptation? There are even researchers who claim that studying the evolution of cognition is virtually impossible (Lewontin, 1998; Bolhuis & Wynne, 2009).

The alternative that Henkjan Honing and Annemie Ploeger of the UvA propose is, first, to distinguish between the notion 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. And secondly, to collect accumulative evidence from a variety of sources (e.g., psychological, physiological, genetic, phylogenetic, and cross-cultural evidence) to be able to show that a specific cognitive trait is indeed an adaptation.

Both relative pitch and beat induction are suggested as primary candidates for such cognitive traits, musical skills that are considered trivial by most humans, but that turn out to be quite special in the rest of the animal world.

Once these fundamental cognitive mechanisms are identified, it becomes possible to see how these might have evolved. In short: the study of the evolution of music cognition is conditional on a characterisation of the basic mechanisms that make up musicality.”

[See also a version in French.]

Honing, H., & Ploeger, A. (2012). Cognition and the Evolution of Music: Pitfalls and Prospects Topics in Cognitive Science. DOI: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01210.x

If music isn’t a luxury, what is it?

The title of the newest and fourteenth book by science writer Philip Ball leaves no doubt: this is a counter-attack on claims made by Steven Pinker in his publications The Language Instinct (1994) and How the Mind Works (1997). Pinker characterised music as ‘auditory cheesecake’: a tasty bonus but, from an evolutionary point of view, no more than a by-product of much more important mental functions such as language (‘music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged’). In his books, Pinker also frequently reduces art to what – biologically speaking – is an irrelevant phenomenon, one that utilises functions that can be called ‘evolutionarily adaptive’, such as the experience of pleasure. The provocation these claims represented some fifteen years ago continues to resonate: countless books referring to Pinker have appeared since (among which The Art Instinct, The Belief Instinct and The Pleasure Instinct). And now, not entirely unexpectedly, here’s The Music Instinct. The aim is clear.

And so this book begins with a discussion of the importance of music, the possible role of music in evolution and the claim that music is not a luxury. It’s a topical discussion currently being pursued in numerous scientific journals and at symposia.

However, in The Music Instinct, Ball adopts a position that in fact declares the whole discussion a non-issue: music simply is (‘It might be genetically hard-wired, or it might not. Either way, we can’t suppress it, let alone meaningfully talk of taking it away’). This is an unfortunate and – given the book’s title – unusual strategy because there really is something to be said about the other views without dismissing them as irrelevant.

Nevertheless, I can only say how wholeheartedly I agree with Ball’s interpretation of the recent literature. I’m impressed by how easily a relative outsider – Ball has written nearly twenty books on topics related mostly to physics – has managed to grasp such a relatively new discipline as music cognition.

Ball passionately defends a number of very clear hypotheses, among which those that say music is more than just sound (‘Music does not somehow emerge from acoustic physics’), that it fundamentally differs from language (‘There is no language of music’) and that musicality is much more widespread than is commonly thought (‘Most of us are musical experts without knowing it’). These are insights each in their own right which only recently have been given an empirical basis and which offer alternative visions to the older, largely psycho-physically oriented research into the psychology of music.

On the whole, The Music Instinct is a convincing book. Ball clearly has a passion for music, as reflected in his detailed and often highly personal descriptions of his numerous music samples, taken primarily from the classical repertoire. But it remains regrettable that he places so much emphasis on the first half of the sub-title of the book – the architecture and effect of music – and thus focuses mainly on the music-theoretical aspects of music. The result is that much of what there is to be said today about the second half of the sub-title – the biological significance of music and why we can’t do without it – is neglected.

(For the complete review, see the reference below]

Honing, H. (2012). If music isn’t a luxury, what is it? Journal of Music, Technology and Education,, 5 (1), 114-117 : 10.1386/jmte.5.1.109_5

Is blogging not completely outdated?

Today (4th of July) I'm celebrating precisely six years of blogging on music cognition. While I was doubting whether this was a sensible idea at all in July 2006, and even more so last year, I'm currently really enjoying writing little snippits about research papers that I come across, forcing me to read these papers slightly better than I would do otherwise :-)

Thanks to all readers for their reactions and criticisms (today exactly 150!), and Psychology Today for supporting the publication of a selection of these blog entries for a more general audience.

I guess I should just keep going...

My home office :-)

Batts, Shelley A., Anthis, Nicholas J., & Smith, Tara C. (2008). Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy. PLoS Biology, 6 (9), 240-245 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060240

Can we know the evolution of human cognition?

According to Dick Lewontin (evolutionary biologist, geneticist and social commentator) there is no way to know the evolution of cognition. He argued that we should ‘give up the childish notion that everything that is interesting about nature can be understood. [..] It might be interesting to know how cognition (whatever that is) arose and spread and changed, but we cannot know. Tough luck.’ (Lewontin, 1998:130)

In the study of the evolution of music cognition, we will have to take into account this critique. So, do we better stop right now, or is there a way to deal with this criticism? (See also Bolhuis & Wynne, 2009.)

While it became quite popular to address music cognition from an evolutionary perspective, there is still little agreement on the idea that music is in fact an adaptation, that it influenced our survival or that it made us sexually more attractive. Music appears to be of little use. It doesn’t quell our hunger, nor do we live a day longer because of it, so why arguing that music is an adaptation?

Are there indeed no arguments to show that music has played a more direct and shaping role in man’s evolutionary development? Or should music be considered as a sexually selected trait, a trait that evolved to attract partners rather than to improve survival chances? Or is music, as Pinker suggested, no more than a pleasant side effect of more important functions, such as speech and language?

Recently a number of interesting papers appeared (see references below) on the possibilities and impossibilities (Heyes, 2012; part of a special issue by The Royal Society dedicated to this topic) and the prospects and pitfalls of studying the evolution of cognition, music cognition being no exception (Honing & Ploeger, 2012; Marcus, 2012).

See also the Science Daily.

Heyes, C. (2012). New thinking: the evolution of human cognition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 367 (1599), 2091-2096 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0111

Honing, H., & Ploeger, A. (2012). Cognition and the Evolution of Music: Pitfalls and Prospects Topics in Cognitive Science, 4 (4), 513-524 DOI: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01210.x

Marcus, G. (2012). Musicality: Instinct or Acquired Skill? Topics in Cognitive Science, 4 (4), 498-512 DOI: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01220.x