Ian Cross

Long-term musical group interaction has a positive influence on empathy in children:

Musical group interaction (MGI) is a complex social setting requiring certain cognitive skills that may also elicit shared psychological states. We argue that many MGI-specific features may also be important for emotional empathy, the ability to experience another person’s emotional state. We thus hypothesized that long-term repeated participation in MGI could help enhance a capacity for emotional empathy even outside of the musical context, through a familiarization with and refinement of MGI empathy-promoting musical components (EPMCs). We tested this hypothesis by designing an MGI programme for primary school children consisting of interactive musical games implementing various EPMCs. We ran the programme for an entire school year and compared the emotional empathy of MGI children to control children using existing and novel measures of empathy before and after the programme. Our results support our hypothesis: MGI children showed higher emotional empathy scores after the study compared to its beginning, and higher scores than control children at the end of the study. These findings shed new light on the emotional processes involved in musical interaction and highlight the remarkable potential of MGI for promoting positive social-emotional capacities such as empathy.

Musical Schemata in Real-Time Listening to a Piece of Music

A series of experiments investigated cognitive processes involved in listening to a piece of music, focusing in particular on the abstraction of surface features (here referred to as cues). Subjects listened to an unfamiliar piece in a familiar musical idiom, and their sensitivities to aspects of the just-heard piece were used to elucidate the nature of their representations of the piece in recent memory. The study also sought to assess the capacities of subjects to use any declarative knowledge of aspects of tonal structure that they possessed in organizing musical material. Three experiments made use of different procedures to address these issues, using either a single short tonal piece—Schubert9s Valse sentimentale, D. 779, op. 50, no. 6—or a variant of this. The first two experiments used nonmusician subjects and examined (1) the cues abstracted in listening to the piece and (2) subjects9 ability to identify the temporal location of segments of the piece after listening. The third experiment explored the constructional abilities of musician and nonmusician subjects, requiring them to create a coherent piece by ordering the segments that made up the original piece. The results of these experiments indicated that although the abilities of musicians differed from those of nonmusicians, both groups of subjects exhibited a weaker sensitivity to features of musical structure than to cues abstracted from the musical surface.

Musicality and the human capacity for culture

This paper proposes that the human capacity for musicality is integral to the human capacity for culture, and that the key feature of music that motivates its efficacy is its indeterminacy of meaning, or floating intentionality. It suggests that, from an evolutionary perspective, a focus on musics commonalities of function (rather than of structure) across cultures provides an appropriate framework for theorising the roles and the operational features of musics indeterminacy of meaning. A three-dimension account of meaning in music is presented in which biologically generic, humanly specific, and culturally enactive dimensions of the experience of music are delineated, with summary examples of the application of the theory to musical usages in different cultures. It is noted that the dimensions outlined in the theory may be operational at different semiotic levels, and it is concluded that music became part of the repertoire of modern human behaviour as an exaptive consequence of processes of progressive altricialisation in the hominin lineage.

The evolutionary nature of musical meaning

The paper will draw on ethnomusicological, cognitive and neuroscientific evidence in suggesting that music and language constitute complementary components of the human communicative toolkit. It will start by outlining an operational definition of music as a mode of social interaction in terms of its generic, cross-cultural properties that facilitates comparison with language as a universal human faculty. It will argue that, despite the fact that music appears much more heterogeneous and differentiated in function from culture to culture than does language, music possesses common attributes across cultures: it exploits the human capacity to entrain to external (particularly social) stimuli, and presents a rich set of semantic fields while under-determining meaning. While language is held to possess both combinatoriality and semanticity, music is often claimed to be combinatorial but to lack semanticity. This paper will argue that music has semanticity, but that this semanticity is adapted for a different function from that of language. Music exploits the human capacity for entrainment, increasing the likelihood that participants will experience a sense of ‘shared intentionality’. It presents the characteristics of an ‘honest signal’ while under-specifying goals in ways that permit individuals to interact even while holding to personal interpretations of goals and meanings that may actually be in conflict. Music allows participants to explore the prospective consequences of their actions and attitudes towards others within a temporal framework that promotes the alignment of participants’ sense of goals. As a generic human faculty music thus provides a medium that is adapted to situations of social uncertainty, a medium by means of which a capacity for flexible social interaction can be explored and reinforced. It will be argued that a faculty for music is likely to have been exaptive in the evolution of the human capacity for complex social interaction.

Incidental and online learning of melodic structure.

The cognition of music, like that of language, is partly rooted in enculturative processes of implicit and incidental learning. Musicians and nonmusicians alike are commonly found to possess detailed implicit knowledge of musical structure which is acquired incidentally through interaction with large samples of music. This paper reports an experiment combining the methodology of artificial grammar learning with musical acquisition of melodic structure. Participants acquired knowledge of grammatical melodic structures under incidental learning conditions in both experimental and untrained control conditions. Subsequent analysis indicates a large effect of unsupervised online learning in the experimental and control group throughout the course of the testing phase suggesting an effective ongoing learning process. Musicians did not outperform nonmusicians, indicating that musical expertise is not advantageous for the learning of a new, unfamiliar melodic system. Confidence ratings suggest that participants became aware of the knowledge guiding their classification performance despite the incidental learning conditions.

The Andean anacrusis? Rhythmic structure and perception in Easter songs of Northern Potosí, Bolivia

This paper is the result of a collaboration between an ethnomusicologist (Henry Stobart) and music psychologist (Ian Cross). It examines the interaction of a variety of processes underlying the rhythmic structure and perception of a song genre of the Bolivian Andes: these include linguistic prosody, movement patterns, perceptual constraints and the dynamics of the cultures musical aesthetics. The “Easter songs “ which form the focus of this study, present particular problems of rhythmic perception for outsiders to the culture (such as the authors), who often tend to misperceive these songs as anacrustic. This phenomenon is addressed through an exploration of the unequal proportions and accent placement in the charango accompaniment, and an analysis of stress patterns of Quechua (and Aymara), the languages in which these songs are sung. It is shown that the first syllable of a phrase is treated as a functional “downbeat” and, despite outsiders’ perceptions, the anacrusis appears to be absent from the Quechua and Aymara musical genres of the region. The paper questions whether these findings might be relevant to other musical genres of the Andes, and considers the problems of perception in the transcription and analysis of Andean music.

Music and Evolution: Consequences and Causes

Music is definable in a broad sense as embodying, entraining and transposably intentionalising time in sound and action. Human infants, in infant–caregiver interaction, and in childhood patterns of thought and behaviour, appear universally to engage in activities that share those attributes, and musics can be construed as cultural particularisations of those infant/childhood interactive and individual behaviours. Music as defined in this way appears to be uniquely human and ancient, most likely arising with Homo sapiens sapiens, ourselves. It is notable that our primate relatives do not appear to engage in activities with all the attributes of “music” as defined here. However, several primate behaviours and attributes might constitute precursors of musicality. In particular, it is suggested here that music may have arisen in the course of evolution in part as a result of processes of progressive altricialisation (a lengthening of the pre-reproductive juvenile period) in the primate and hominid lineages; a scenario for exploring the dynamics of altriciality in computational terms is also suggested.

Music as a Biocultural Phenomenon

Abstract: There is a need to clarify the domain of music as an object of cognitive and neuroscientific research. This paper explores some ramifications of an inclusive delineation of the domain of music for such research.

Music and communication in music psychology

There is a general consensus that music is both universal and communicative, and musical dialogue is a key element in much music-therapeutic practice. However, the idea that music is a communicative medium has, to date, received little attention within the cognitive sciences, and the limited amount of research that addresses how and what music communicates has resulted in findings that appear to be of limited relevance to music therapy. This article will draw on ethnomusicological evidence and an understanding of communication derived from the study of speech to sketch a framework within which to situate and understand music as communicative practice. It will outline some key features of music as an interactive participatory medium – including entrainment and floating intentionality – that can help underpin an understanding of music as communicative, and that may help guide experimental approaches in the cognitive science of music to shed light on the processes involved in musical communication and on the consequences of engagement in communication through music for interacting individuals. It will suggest that the development of such approaches may enable the cognitive sciences to provide a more comprehensive, predictive understanding of music in interaction that could be of direct benefit to music therapy.

Exploring violin sound quality: Investigating English timbre descriptors and correlating resynthesized acoustical modifications with perceptual properties

Performers often discuss the sound quality of a violin or the sound obtained by particular playing techniques, calling upon a diverse vocabulary. This study explores the verbal descriptions, made by performers, of the distinctive timbres of different violins. Sixty-one common descriptors were collected and then arranged by violinists on a map, so that words with similar meanings lay close together, and those with different meanings lay far apart. The results of multidimensional scaling demonstrated consistent use among violinists of many words, and highlighted which words are used for similar purposes. These terms and their relations were then used to investigate the perceptual effect of acoustical modifications of violin sounds produced by roving of the levels in five one-octave wide bands, 190-380, 380-760, 760-1520, 1520-3040, and 3040-6080 Hz. Pairs of sounds were presented, and each participant was asked to indicate which of the sounds was more bright, clear, harsh, nasal, or good (in separate runs for each descriptor). Increased brightness and clarity were associated with moderately increased levels in bands 4 and 5, whereas increased harshness was associated with a strongly increased level in band 4. Judgments differed across participants for the qualities nasal and good.