Bimusicalism: The Implicit Dual Enculturation of Cognitive and Affective Systems

Wong, Patrick C. M.; Roy, Anil K.; Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth

doi:10.1525/mp.2009.27.2.81

Cited by 95 publications

(74 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…In another study that used unfamiliar but Western-sounding melodies, memory faded over time but was still above chance levels after 1 month (Peretz et al, 1998). Although listeners with limited music training lack explicit knowledge of mode or meter, their implicit knowledge of Western tonal and metrical structures would have facilitated perception (e.g., Hannon & Trehub, 2005;Lynch, Eilers, Oller, & Urbano, 1990;Trehub & Hannon, 2009) and memory (Demorest, Morrison, Beken, & Jungbluth, 2008;Demorest et al, 2010;Wong, Roy, & Margulis, 2009) in the present study. Had the melodies been atonal, nonmetrical, and/or drawn from a foreign musical system (e.g., Balinese, Balkan, Indian), recognition would have been much more difficult, and it is unknown whether changes in surface features would have a detrimental effect similar to the ones that we observed.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 41%

Remembering the melody and timbre, forgetting the key and tempo

Schellenberg

Habashi

2015

Mem Cogn

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The identity of a melody is independent of surface features such as key (pitch level), tempo (speed), and timbre (musical instrument). We examined the duration of memory for melodies (tunes) and whether such memory is affected by changes in key, tempo, or timbre. After listening to previously unfamiliar melodies twice, participants provided recognition ratings for the same (old) melodies as well as for an equal number of new melodies. The delay between initial exposure and test was 10 min, 1 day, or 1 week. In Experiment 1, half of the old melodies were transposed by six semitones or shifted in tempo by 64 beats per minute. In Experiment 2, half of the old melodies were changed in timbre (piano to saxophone, or vice versa). In both experiments, listeners remembered the melodies, and there was no forgetting over the course of a week. Changing the key or tempo from exposure to test had a detrimental impact on recognition after 10 min and 1 day, but not after 1 week. Changing the timbre affected recognition negatively after all three delays. Mental representations of unfamiliar melodies appear to be consolidated after only two presentations. These representations include surface information unrelated to a melody's identity, although information about key and tempo fades at a faster rate than information about timbre.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 41%

Remembering the melody and timbre, forgetting the key and tempo

Schellenberg

Habashi

2015

Mem Cogn

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“…Wong et al (2009b) illustrate that passive exposure to the music from two cultures can result in the development of true bimusicals who approach both styles with affective and cognitive competence lacking in monomusicals of similar age and background. Wong et al (in press) used structural equation modeling to investigate fMRI data from bimusical and monomusical listeners, finding more connectivity, and larger differentiation between the musical systems in bimusicals.…”

Section: Implicit Memory and Musicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit Memory in Music and Language

Ettlinger¹,

Margulis²,

Wong³

2011

Front. Psychology

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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.

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“…This is effective in investigations of bimusicalism (e.g., Wong et al, 2009, 2011), but also introduces variability in that groups familiar with a particular World music such as Gamelan or Indian music, because of globalization (Huron, 2008), are also enculturated to Western tonal music. As an alternative and given the lack of monomusical Balinese listeners, we manipulated musical material to investigate effects of distal and proximal contexts, within the experimental setting, on Western listeners' judgments of completeness and coherence on melodies composed in a Balinese scale and played on Balinese instruments.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expectations in culturally unfamiliar music: influences of proximal and distal cues and timbral characteristics

et al. 2013

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Listeners' musical perception is influenced by cues that can be stored in short-term memory (e.g., within the same musical piece) or long-term memory (e.g., based on one's own musical culture). The present study tested how these cues (referred to as, respectively, proximal and distal cues) influence the perception of music from an unfamiliar culture. Western listeners who were naïve to Gamelan music judged completeness and coherence for newly constructed melodies in the Balinese gamelan tradition. In these melodies, we manipulated the final tone with three possibilities: the original gong tone, an in-scale tone replacement or an out-of-scale tone replacement. We also manipulated the musical timbre employed in Gamelan pieces. We hypothesized that novice listeners are sensitive to out-of-scale changes, but not in-scale changes, and that this might be influenced by the more unfamiliar timbre created by Gamelan “sister” instruments whose harmonics beat with the harmonics of the other instrument, creating a timbrally “shimmering” sound. The results showed: (1) out-of-scale endings were judged less complete than original gong and in-scale endings; (2) for melodies played with “sister” instruments, in-scale endings were judged as less complete than original endings. Furthermore, melodies using the original scale tones were judged more coherent than melodies containing few or multiple tone replacements; melodies played on single instruments were judged more coherent than the same melodies played on sister instruments. Additionally, there is some indication of within-session statistical learning, with expectations for the initially-novel materials developing during the course of the experiment. The data suggest the influence of both distal cues (e.g., previously unfamiliar timbres) and proximal cues (within the same sequence and over the experimental session) on the perception of melodies from other cultural systems based on unfamiliar tunings and scale systems.

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Bimusicalism: The Implicit Dual Enculturation of Cognitive and Affective Systems

Cited by 95 publications

References 45 publications

Remembering the melody and timbre, forgetting the key and tempo

Remembering the melody and timbre, forgetting the key and tempo

Implicit Memory in Music and Language

Expectations in culturally unfamiliar music: influences of proximal and distal cues and timbral characteristics

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