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.