Electroencephalography (EEG) was used in a cross-cultural music study investigating phrase boundary perception. Chinese and German musicians performed a cultural categorization task under Chinese and Western music listening conditions. Western music was the major subject for both groups of musicians, while Chinese music was familiar to Chinese subjects only. By manipulating the presence of pauses between two phrases in the biphrasal melodies, EEG correlates for the perception of phrase boundaries were found in both groups under both music listening conditions. Between 450 and 600 ms, the music CPS (closure positive shift), which had been found in earlier studies with a false tone detection task, was replicated for the more global categorization task and for all combinations of subject group and musical style. At short latencies (100 and 450 ms post phrase boundary offset), EEG correlates varied as a function of musical styles and subject group. Both bottom-up (style properties of the music) and top-down (acculturation of the subjects) information interacted during this early processing stage.
IntroductionMusic is a culturally specific phenomenon, which is certainly determined by ethnic background, social environment and traditions. However, the question to what extent the ability to understand and appreciate music is culturally dependent is still controversial. Ethnomusicologists usually assume that extensive experience of music within its cultural context is essential for its basic structural principles to be understood (Blacking, 1973). Lynch and Eilers (1992) explored musical tuning perception in infancy and adulthood and found that adult's perception of musical tuning was culturally specific, and infants between 6 and 12 months of age started to show the same culturally specific performance as adults did. In the same line, Drake and El Heni (2003) proved that acculturation, i.e., the passive exposure to a particular type of music since birth, influenced the perception and cognition of music. On the other hand, some psychological studies have proved the existence of universal, not culturally dependent, aspects of music perception (Castellano et al., 1984;Krumhansl, 1995Krumhansl, , 2000. Drake and Bertrand (2001) reviewed a number of rhythm perception and production studies and concluded that some aspects of temporal processing in music might be universal, in the sense that they function in a similar manner irrespective of an individual's cultural exposure and experience. Likewise, in a study of the cross-cultural emotion perception in music,