Music as a window into real-world communication

Abstract

Communication has been studied extensively in the context of speech and language. While speech is tremendously effective at transferring ideas between people, music is another communicative mode that has a unique power to bring people together and transmit a rich tapestry of emotions, through joint music-making and listening in a variety of everyday contexts. Research has begun to examine the behavioral and neural correlates of the joint action required for successful musical interactions, but it has yet to fully account for the rich, dynamic, multimodal nature of musical communication. We review the current literature in this area and propose that naturalistic musical paradigms will open up new ways to study communication more broadly.

A framework for joint music making: behavioral findings, neural processes, and computational models

“…These goals may entail executing a musical score, a memorized piece, or an appealing improvised performance. To achieve such goals, coperformers can adopt different strategies while continuously exchanging information between one another through multiple non-verbal communication channels (see also Izen et al, 2023). Intuitively, one might expect this information to be solely transferred through the auditory domain, given that music is something we primarily listen to.…”

“…As a human behavior, joint music making (JMM) is as fascinating as it is mysterious. Covering diverse and complex social functions, and accompanying rituals, courtships, or even battles, JMM has often been labeled a microcosm of social interaction (D'Ausilio et al, 2015;Keller, 2008;Izen et al, 2023) and a driving force for the evolution of music (Savage et al, 2021;Keller et al, 2017;Mehr et al, 2021). Yet, its underlying cognitive, neural, and computational mechanisms remain, to date, poorly understood.…”