Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

Selective neurophysiologic responses to music in instrumentalists with different listening biographies

To appropriately adapt to constant sensory stimulation, neurons in the auditory system are tuned to various acoustic characteristics, such as center frequencies, frequency modulations, and their combinations, particularly those combinations that carry species‐specific communicative functions. The present study asks whether such tunings extend beyond acoustic and communicative functions to auditory self‐relevance and expertise. More specifically, we examined the role of the listening biography—an individuals long term experience with a particular type of auditory input—on perceptual‐neural plasticity. Two groups of expert instrumentalists (violinists and flutists) listened to matched musical excerpts played on the two instruments (J.S. Bach Partitas for solo violin and flute) while their cerebral hemodynamic responses were measured using fMRI. Our experimental design allowed for a comprehensive investigation of the neurophysiology (cerebral hemodynamic responses as measured by fMRI) of auditory expertise (i.e., when violinists listened to violin music and when flutists listened to flute music) and nonexpertise (i.e., when subjects listened to music played on the other instrument). We found an extensive cerebral network of expertise, which implicates increased sensitivity to musical syntax (BA 44), timbre (auditory association cortex), and sound–motor interactions (precentral gyrus) when listening to music played on the instrument of expertise (the instrument for which subjects had a unique listening biography). These findings highlight auditory self‐relevance and expertise as a mechanism of perceptual‐neural plasticity, and implicate neural tuning that includes and extends beyond acoustic and communication‐relevant structures. Hum Brain Mapp 2009.

Implicit memory in music and language

Research on music and language in recent decades has focused on their overlapping neurophysiological, perceptual, and cognitive underpinnings, ranging from the mechanism for encoding basic auditory cues to the mechanism for detecting violations in phrase structure. These overlaps have most often been identified in musicians with musical knowledge that was acquired explicitly, through formal training. In this paper, we review independent bodies of work in music and language that suggest an important role for implicitly acquired knowledge, implicit memory, and their associated neural structures in the acquisition of linguistic or musical grammar. These findings motivate potential new work that examines music and language comparatively in the context of the implicit memory system.

Musical style, psychoaesthetics, and prospects for entropy as an analytic tool

Information theory as formulated by Shannon (1948) has been intermittently pursued as a potential tool for musical analysis; however, significant problems have prevented it from coalescing into a fruitful theoretical approach. Papers examining music from the perspective of information theory are widely distributed among journals from different fields (Nettelheim 1997) and do not show a steady, cumulative trajectory in time. Rather, a cluster of papers in the late 1950s and 1960s (Pinkerton 1956; Meyer 1957; Youngblood 1958; Krahenbuehl and Coons 1959; Cohen 1962; Hiller and Fuller 1967), another in the 1980s (Knopoff and Hutchinson 1981, 1983; Snyder 1990), and a few contemporary studies (Huron 2006; Temperley 2007) represent the primary efforts.

When Program Notes Don't Help: Music Descriptions and Enjoyment.

The widespread practice of including program notes for classical concerts assumes that extramusical information affects musical experience, but the psychological mechanisms underlying this process are little understood. In this study, 16 people without formal musical training heard excerpts from Beethoven String Quartets prefaced by either a dramatic description, a structural description, or no description. They were asked to rate their enjoyment of the music, and in a later stage, to recall excerpts and descriptions. Results showed a significant negative effect of description, suggesting that prefacing an excerpt with a text description reduces enjoyment of the music. In a second experiment, 11 new participants heard the same excerpts in the different description conditions, and were not asked to rate enjoyment until a second stage of the study. Results followed the same pattern as those in the first experiment, but did not rise to the level of significance. Conceptualizing listening by connecting it to ...The widespread practice of including program notes for classical concerts assumes that extramusical information affects musical experience, but the psychological mechanisms underlying this process are little understood. In this study, 16 people without formal musical training heard excerpts from Beethoven String Quartets prefaced by either a dramatic description, a structural description, or no description. They were asked to rate their enjoyment of the music, and in a later stage, to recall excerpts and descriptions. Results showed a significant negative effect of description, suggesting that prefacing an excerpt with a text description reduces enjoyment of the music. In a second experiment, 11 new participants heard the same excerpts in the different description conditions, and were not asked to rate enjoyment until a second stage of the study. Results followed the same pattern as those in the first experiment, but did not rise to the level of significance. Conceptualizing listening by connecting it to linguistically named correlates (a practice fundamental to music training) may have more multifarious (and not always straightforwardly beneficial) effects on musical experience than commonly assumed.

The bimusical brain is not two monomusical brains in one: Evidence from musical affective processing

Complex auditory exposures in ambient environments include systems of not only linguistic but also musical sounds. Because musical exposure is often passive, consisting of listening rather than performing, examining listeners without formal musical training allows for the investigation of the effects of passive exposure on our nervous system without active use. Additionally, studying listeners who have exposure to more than one musical system allows for an evaluation of how the brain acquires multiple symbolic and communicative systems. In the present fMRI study, listeners who had been exposed to Western-only (monomusicals) and both Indian and Western musical systems (bimusicals) since childhood and did not have significant formal musical training made tension judgments on Western and Indian music. Significant group by music interactions in temporal and limbic regions were found, with effects predominantly driven by between-music differences in temporal regions in the monomusicals and by between-music differences in limbic regions in the bimusicals. Effective connectivity analysis of this network via structural equation modeling (SEM) showed significant path differences across groups and music conditions, most notably a higher degree of connectivity and larger differentiation between the music conditions within the bimusicals. SEM was also used to examine the relationships among the degree of music exposure, affective responses, and activation in various brain regions. Results revealed a more complex behavioral–neural relationship in the bimusicals, suggesting that affective responses in this group are shaped by multiple behavioral and neural factors. These three lines of evidence suggest a clear differentiation of the effects of the exposure of one versus multiple musical systems.

Repetition and emotive communication in music versus speech.

Music and speech are often placed alongside one another as comparative cases. Their relative overlaps and disassociations have been well explored (e.g., Patel, 2008). But one key attribute distinguishing these two domains has often been overlooked: the greater preponderance of repetition in music in comparison to speech. Recent fMRI studies have shown that familiarity – achieved through repetition – is a critical component of emotional engagement with music (Pereira et al., 2011). If repetition is fundamental to emotional responses to music, and repetition is a key distinguisher between the domains of music and speech, then close examination of the phenomenon of repetition might help clarify the ways that music elicits emotion differently than speech.

Aesthetic Responses to Repetition in Unfamiliar Music

Listeners who lacked special expertise in contemporary art music were presented with 1-minute excerpts of music by Luciano Berio and Elliott Carter in either their original, unaltered versions or in modified versions such that segments within the excerpt repeated immediately or after a delay. They were asked to rate each excerpts enjoyability, interest, and artistry on 7-point Likert-like scales. Listeners rated the excerpts in both repetition conditions as more enjoyable, interesting, and artistic than the original, unaltered versions, suggesting that repetitiveness is an important factor in aesthetic responses to unfamiliar styles.

Timbre priming effects and expectation in melody

Abstract In this study, participants identified the timbre of pitches when they occurred in isolation, and again when they occurred appended to short melodies. For pitches congruent with the melody, timbre identification generally improved when the pitches were appended to the melody in comparison to when they occurred in isolation. In addition, the amount of improvement was broadly consistent with theoretical accounts of the degree to which the pitches were expected, given the preceding melody. This finding relates both to proposed interactions in processing between pitch and timbre, and to theoretical work regarding melodic expectations. It suggests that melodic expectations can be revealed implicitly, and is consistent with the idea that they operate at a relatively early stage of perceptual processing. In this study, priming effects were shown in listeners without musical training, demonstrating that expectations can develop in response to passive exposure to music, not only in response to formal training.

Effects of Asymmetric Cultural Experiences on the Auditory Pathway: Evidence from Music

Cultural experiences come in many different forms, such as immersion in a particular linguistic community, exposure to faces of people with different racial backgrounds, or repeated encounters with music of a particular tradition. In most circumstances, these cultural experiences are asymmetric, meaning one type of experience occurs more frequently than other types (e.g., a person raised in India will likely encounter the Indian todi scale more so than a Westerner). In this paper, we will discuss recent findings from our laboratories that reveal the impact of short‐ and long‐term asymmetric musical experiences on how the nervous system responds to complex sounds. We will discuss experiments examining how musical experience may facilitate the learning of a tone language, how musicians develop neural circuitries that are sensitive to musical melodies played on their instrument of expertise, and how even everyday listeners who have little formal training are particularly sensitive to music of their own culture(s). An understanding of these cultural asymmetries is useful in formulating a more comprehensive model of auditory perceptual expertise that considers how experiences shape auditory skill levels. Such a model has the potential to aid in the development of rehabilitation programs for the efficacious treatment of neurologic impairments.

“But they told me it was professional”: Extrinsic factors in the evaluation of musical performance

This study investigated the performance preferences of listeners without formal training in music. Specifically, it asked whether the quality of the performance (as represented by the status of the performer), the order of presentation of the performances, and extrinsic information about the quality of the performance impacted preferences. In Experiment 1, participants heard pairs of performances of solo piano music and were informed that one was played by a conservatory student, and one by a world-renowned professional. After each pair, they selected the one they thought had been performed by the professional. Their responses seem to have been driven by a combination of a preference for the performance actually played by the professional and a preference for the second performance in the pair. In Experiment 2, they heard the same performance pairs, but this time were informed, correctly or incorrectly, before each performance whether it was played by a student or by a professional. After each pair, they selected the performance they preferred. This time, their responses were influenced not just by the actual performer identity and the order of presentation, but also by the priming condition. Listener preferences seem to be driven by a combination of factors intrinsic and extrinsic to the performance itself.