Musical meaning within Super Semantics

Schlenker, Philippe

doi:10.1007/s10988-021-09329-8

Cited by 13 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 47 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Finally, if musical pitch has an effect on gait, it appears possible that more complex spectral properties (rich harmonic structure, timbre, consonance) do too. The present data-driven paradigm (for which we provide all experimental software as open-source 1 ) therefore opens up a vast domain of research to investigate the interaction of each of these dimensions with human motion, and elucidate the intricate sensorimotor mechanisms that subserve our perception of such elusive multimodal percepts as motor and musical stability [45], predictive uncertainty [46], tension [47] or smoothness/jerkiness [10].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cracking the pitch code of music-motor synchronization using data-driven methods

Migotti¹,

Aucouturier²

2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The study of auditory-motor synchronization with music has been so far mostly concerned with timing. For instance, research has established that people are able to spontaneously coordinate with musical beat when walking or running. Yet, music is more than a metronome, and the relation between the spectral dimension of music, i.e. parameters such as its pitch, timber, or harmonic structure, and simultaneous motion remains nearly unknown. Here, we introduce a novel data-driven paradigm in which participants were asked to walk on a treadmill while listening to a large variety of musical tones systematically varied in pitch. Using analysis techniques inspired by psychophysical reverse correlation, we show that participants' gait patterns while walking to music spontaneously encode pitch height: despite being instructed to simply synchronize in time, participants steps were both longer and heavier on tones with lower pitches. These findings reveal that, similarly to time perception, pitch cognition is not purely 'disembodied' and suggest that listeners' spontaneous motor reactions to pitch might ground their ability to mentally represent music.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cracking the pitch code of music-motor synchronization using data-driven methods

Migotti¹,

Aucouturier²

2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…These deviations in part reflect constraints on motor planning, but they are also expressive and have been argued to be used evoke associations with physical motion (Gabrielsson, 1987; Kronman & Sundberg, 1984; Repp, 1992; Todd, 1992). Honing (2003) related phrase-final ritardando in music to the “exertion of a continuous breaking force.” Other forms of physical interpretations of musical events are reviewed in Schlenker (2019). An account of the cue distribution in terms of motor-planning-based or other physical interpretations of the cause of the sound does not explain, however, why the same pattern should be observed in the tactile domain when perceiving electroshocks at regular intervals (Woodrow, 1909), or in the visual domain (Miner, 1903; Pena et al, 2011).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Two-dimensional parsing of the acoustic stream explains the Iambic–Trochaic Law.

Wagner¹

2022

Psychological Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In a sequence of otherwise equal sounds, listeners tend to hear a series of trochees (groups of two sounds with an initial beat) when every other sound is louder; they tend to hear a series of iambs (groups of two sounds with a final beat) when every other sound is longer. The article presents evidence that this so-called "Iambic-Trochaic Law" (ITL) is a consequence of the way listeners parse the signal along two orthogonal dimensions, grouping (Which tone is first/last?) and prominence (Which tone is prominent?). A production experiment shows that in speech, intensity and duration correlate when encoding prominence, but anticorrelate when encoding grouping. A model of the production data shows that the ITL emerges from the cue distribution based on a listener's predicted decisions about prominence and grouping respectively. This, and further predictions derived from the model, are then tested in speech and tone perception. The perception results provide evidence that intensity and duration are excellent cues for grouping and prominence, but poor cues for the distinction between iamb and trochee per se. Overall, the findings illustrate how the ITL derives from the way listeners recover two orthogonal perceptual dimensions, grouping and prominence, from a single acoustic stream.

show abstract

“…However, this framework has been criticised for the proposition to explain structural differences between language and music by the absence of a lexicon in music. Several frameworks of music perception specifically include a lexical component, either seen as a repertoire of all the pieces one has heard, referred to as ‘musical lexicon’ (Peretz et al., 2003) or as the meaning of a given piece with regard to the external world, to the listener's affect, or to the piece's own musical characteristics (Koelsch, 2011b; Schlenker, 2017, 2022). Roberts (2012) proposed that language and music share a computational system (in the sense of narrow‐syntax and a simple algorithm like Merge), but rely on different lexicons and have different external and internal interfaces (Roberts, 2012).…”

Section: Domain‐specific Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Situating language and music research in a domain‐specific versus domain‐general framework: A review of theoretical and empirical data

Drakoulaki,

Anagnostopoulou,

Guasti

et al. 2024

Language and Linguist. Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

While many theoretical proposals about the relationship between language and music processing have been proposed over the past 40 years, recent empirical advances have shed new light on this relationship. Many features are shared between language and music, inspiring research in the fields of linguistic theory, systematic musicology, and cognitive (neuro‐)science. This research has led to many and diverse findings, making comparisons difficult. In the current review, we propose a framework within which to organise past research and conduct future research, suggesting that past research has assumed either domain‐specificity or domain‐generality for language and music. Domain‐specific approaches theoretically and experimentally describe aspects of language and music processing assuming that there is shared (structure‐building) processing. Domain‐general approaches theoretically and experimentally describe how mechanisms such as cognitive control, attention or neural entrainment can explain language and music processing. Here we propose that combining elements from domain‐specific and domain‐general approaches can be beneficial for advances in theoretical and experimental work, as well as for diagnoses and interventions for atypical populations. We provide examples of past research which has implicitly merged domain‐specific and domain‐general assumptions, and suggest new experimental designs that can result from such a combination aiming to further our understanding of the human brain.

show abstract

Musical meaning within Super Semantics

Cited by 13 publications

References 47 publications

Cracking the pitch code of music-motor synchronization using data-driven methods

Cracking the pitch code of music-motor synchronization using data-driven methods

Two-dimensional parsing of the acoustic stream explains the Iambic–Trochaic Law.

Situating language and music research in a domain‐specific versus domain‐general framework: A review of theoretical and empirical data

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About