Culture in music cognition
Encyclopedia
Culture in music cognition refers to the impact that a person's culture
has on their music cognition
, including their preferences, emotion recognition, and musical memory
. Musical preferences are biased toward culturally familiar musical traditions beginning in infancy, and adults' classification of the emotion of a musical piece depends on both culturally-specific and universal structural features. Additionally, individuals' musical memory
abilities are greater for culturally familiar music than for culturally unfamiliar music. The sum of these effects makes culture a powerful influence in music cognition.
and adulthood. People tend to prefer and remember music from their own cultural tradition.
Familiarity for culturally regular meter
styles is already in place for young infants of only a few months' age. The looking times of 4- to 8-month old Western infants indicate that they prefer Western meter in music, while Turkish infants of the same age prefer both Turkish and Western meters (Western meters not being completely unfamiliar in Turkish culture). Both groups preferred either meter
when compared with arbitrary meter.
In addition to influencing preference for meter, culture affects people's ability to correctly identify music styles. Adolescents from Singapore and the UK rated familiarity and preference for excerpts of Chinese
, Malay, and Indian
music styles. Neither group demonstrated a preference for the Indian music samples, although the Singaporean teenagers recognized them. Participants from Singapore
showed higher preference for and ability to recognize the Chinese and Malay samples; UK
participants showed little preference or recognition for any of the music samples, as those types of music are not present in their native culture.
, but Japanese individuals were far more receptive to Eastern
music. Among the participants, there was one group with little musical experience and one group that had received supplemental musical experience in their lifetimes. Although both American and Japanese participants disliked formal Eastern styles of music and preferred Western styles of music, participants with greater musical experience showed a wider range of preference responses not specific to their own culture.
to both genres of music
. In a study conducted with participants familiar with Western, Indian, and both Western and Indian music, the bimusical participants (exposed to both Indian and Western styles) showed no bias
for either music style in recognition tasks and did not indicate that one style of music was more tense than the other. In contrast, the Western and Indian participants more successfully recognized music from their own culture and felt the other culture's music was more tense on the whole. These results indicate that everyday exposure to music from both cultures can result in cognitive sensitivity to music styles from those cultures.
Bilingualism
typically confers specific preferences for the language of lyrics
in a song. When monolingual (English
-speaking) and bilingual (Spanish
- and English-speaking) sixth graders listened to the same song played in an instrumental, English, or Spanish version, ratings of preference showed that bilingual students preferred the Spanish version, while monolingual students more often preferred the instrumental version; the children's self-reported distraction was the same for all excerpts. Spanish (bilingual) speakers also identified most closely with the Spanish song. Thus, the language of lyrics interacts with a listener's culture and language abilities to affect preferences.
, and timbre
. Fast tempo, for example, is typically associated with happiness, regardless of a listener's cultural background.
listeners accurately categorize angry, joyful, and happy musical excerpts from familiar traditions (Japanese and Western samples) and relatively unfamiliar traditions (Hindustani). Simple, fast melodies
receive joyful ratings from these participants; simple, slow samples receive sad ratings, and loud, complex excerpts are perceived as angry. Strong relationships between emotional judgments and structural acoustic cues suggest the importance of universal musical properties in categorizing unfamiliar music.
When both Korean and American
participants judged the intended emotion of Korean folksongs, the American group’s identification of happy and sad songs was equivalent to levels observed for Korean listeners. Surprisingly, Americans exhibited greater accuracy in anger assessments than the Korean group. The latter result implies cultural differences in anger perception
occur independently of familiarity, while the similarity of American and Korean happy and sad judgments indicate the role of universal auditory cues
in emotional perception.
Categorization of unfamiliar music varies with intended emotion. Timbre mediates Western listeners’ recognition of angry and peaceful Hindustani songs. Flute
timbre supports the detection of peace, whereas string
timbre aids anger identification. Happy and sad assessments, on the other hand, rely primarily on relatively “low-level” structural information such as tempo
. Both low-level cues (e.g., slow tempo) and timbre aid in the detection of peaceful music, but only timbre cued anger recognition. Communication of peace, therefore, takes place at multiple structural levels, while anger seems to be conveyed nearly exclusively by timbre. Similarities between aggressive vocalizations and angry music (e.g., roughness) may contribute to the salience of timbre in anger assessments.
dimension, the cue-redundancy model predicts that complexity is perceived independently of experience. However, South African and Finnish listeners assign different complexity ratings to identical African
folk songs. Thus, the cue-redundancy model may be overly simplistic in its distinctions between structural feature detection and cultural learning, at least in the case of complexity.
or jazz
excerpts multiple times rate the elicited and conveyed emotion of the pieces as higher relative to participants who hear the pieces once.
and tone
cues elicit “mixed affect,” demonstrating the potential for mixed emotional percepts. Use of dichotomous scales (e.g., simple happy/sad ratings) may mask this phenomenon, as these tasks require participants to report a single component of a multidimensional affective experience.
and working memory
systems are critically involved in the appreciation and comprehension of music. Long-term memory enables the listener to develop musical expectation based on previous experience while working memory is necessary to relate pitch
es to one another in a phrase, between phrases, and throughout a piece.
Neuroscientific evidence suggests that memory
for music is, at least in part, special and distinct from other forms of memory. The neural processes of music memory retrieval
share much with the neural processes of verbal memory
retrieval, as indicated by functional magnetic resonance imaging
studies comparing the brain areas activated during each task. Both musical and verbal memory retrieval activate the left inferior frontal cortex, which is thought to be involved in executive function, especially executive function of verbal retrieval, and the posterior middle temporal cortex, which is thought to be involved in semantic retrieval. However, musical semantic retrieval also bilaterally activates the superior temporal gyri
containing the primary auditory cortex.
Despite the universality of music, enculturation
has a pronounced effect on individuals' memory for music. Evidence suggests that people develop their cognitive understanding of music from their cultures. People are best at recognizing and remembering music in the style of their native culture, and their music recognition and memory is better for music from familiar but nonnative cultures than it is for music from unfamiliar cultures. Part of the difficulty in remembering culturally unfamiliar music may arise from the use of different neural processes when listening to familiar and unfamiliar music. For instance, brain areas involved in attention, including the right angular gyrus and middle frontal gyrus, show increased activity when listening to culturally unfamiliar music compared to novel but culturally familiar music.
before a child’s cognitive schemata for music is fully formed, perhaps beginning at as early as one year of age. Like adults
, children are also better able to remember novel music from their native culture than from unfamiliar ones, although they are less capable than adults at remembering more complex music.
Children’s developing music cognition may be influenced by the language of their native culture. For instance, children in English-speaking cultures develop the ability to identify pitches from familiar songs at 9 or 10 years old, while Japanese children develop the same ability at age 5 or 6. This difference may be due to the Japanese language’s use of pitch accents
, which encourages better pitch discrimination at an early age, rather than the stress accents upon which English relies.
traditions. For example, Western participants presented with a series of pitches followed by a test tone not present in the original series were more likely to mistakenly indicate that the test tone was originally present if the tone was derived from a Western scale
than if it was derived from a culturally unfamiliar scale.
and perceptions
of tension displayed by individuals whose listening experience is limited to one musical tradition.
Other evidence suggests that some changes in music appreciation and comprehension can occur over a short period of time. For instance, after half an hour of passive exposure to original melodies
using familiar Western pitches in an unfamiliar musical grammar
or harmonic structure (the Bohlen-Pierce scale
), Western participants demonstrated increased recognition memory and greater affinity for melodies in this grammar. This suggests that even very brief exposure to unfamiliar music can rapidly affect music perception and memory.
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
has on their music cognition
Music cognition
Music cognition is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the mental processes that support musical behaviors, including perception, comprehension, memory, attention, and performance...
, including their preferences, emotion recognition, and musical memory
Music-related memory
Musical memory refers to the ability to remember music-related information, such as melodic content and other progressions of tones or pitches. The differences found between linguistic memory and musical memory have led researchers to theorize that musical memory is encoded differently from...
. Musical preferences are biased toward culturally familiar musical traditions beginning in infancy, and adults' classification of the emotion of a musical piece depends on both culturally-specific and universal structural features. Additionally, individuals' musical memory
Music-related memory
Musical memory refers to the ability to remember music-related information, such as melodic content and other progressions of tones or pitches. The differences found between linguistic memory and musical memory have led researchers to theorize that musical memory is encoded differently from...
abilities are greater for culturally familiar music than for culturally unfamiliar music. The sum of these effects makes culture a powerful influence in music cognition.
Effect of culture
Culturally-bound preferences and familiarity for music begin in infancy and continue through adolescenceAdolescence
Adolescence is a transitional stage of physical and mental human development generally occurring between puberty and legal adulthood , but largely characterized as beginning and ending with the teenage stage...
and adulthood. People tend to prefer and remember music from their own cultural tradition.
Familiarity for culturally regular meter
Meter (music)
Meter or metre is a term that music has inherited from the rhythmic element of poetry where it means the number of lines in a verse, the number of syllables in each line and the arrangement of those syllables as long or short, accented or unaccented...
styles is already in place for young infants of only a few months' age. The looking times of 4- to 8-month old Western infants indicate that they prefer Western meter in music, while Turkish infants of the same age prefer both Turkish and Western meters (Western meters not being completely unfamiliar in Turkish culture). Both groups preferred either meter
Meter (music)
Meter or metre is a term that music has inherited from the rhythmic element of poetry where it means the number of lines in a verse, the number of syllables in each line and the arrangement of those syllables as long or short, accented or unaccented...
when compared with arbitrary meter.
In addition to influencing preference for meter, culture affects people's ability to correctly identify music styles. Adolescents from Singapore and the UK rated familiarity and preference for excerpts of Chinese
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
, Malay, and Indian
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
music styles. Neither group demonstrated a preference for the Indian music samples, although the Singaporean teenagers recognized them. Participants from Singapore
Singapore
Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
showed higher preference for and ability to recognize the Chinese and Malay samples; UK
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
participants showed little preference or recognition for any of the music samples, as those types of music are not present in their native culture.
Effect of musical experience
An individual's musical experience may affect how they formulate preferences for music from their own culture and other cultures. American and Japanese individuals (non-music majors) both indicated preference for Western musicWestern music (North America)
Western music originated as a form of American folk music. Originally composed by and about the people who settled and worked throughout the Western United States and Western Canada. Directly related musically to old English, Scottish, and Irish folk ballads, Western music celebrates the life of...
, but Japanese individuals were far more receptive to Eastern
Eastern world
__FORCETOC__The term Eastern world refers very broadly to the various cultures or social structures and philosophical systems of Eastern Asia or geographically the Eastern Culture...
music. Among the participants, there was one group with little musical experience and one group that had received supplemental musical experience in their lifetimes. Although both American and Japanese participants disliked formal Eastern styles of music and preferred Western styles of music, participants with greater musical experience showed a wider range of preference responses not specific to their own culture.
Dual cultures
Bimusicalism is a phenomenon in which people well-versed and familiar with music from two different cultures exhibit dual sensitivityStimulus (physiology)
In physiology, a stimulus is a detectable change in the internal or external environment. The ability of an organism or organ to respond to external stimuli is called sensitivity....
to both genres of music
Music genre
A music genre is a categorical and typological construct that identifies musical sounds as belonging to a particular category and type of music that can be distinguished from other types of music...
. In a study conducted with participants familiar with Western, Indian, and both Western and Indian music, the bimusical participants (exposed to both Indian and Western styles) showed no bias
Bias
Bias is an inclination to present or hold a partial perspective at the expense of alternatives. Bias can come in many forms.-In judgement and decision making:...
for either music style in recognition tasks and did not indicate that one style of music was more tense than the other. In contrast, the Western and Indian participants more successfully recognized music from their own culture and felt the other culture's music was more tense on the whole. These results indicate that everyday exposure to music from both cultures can result in cognitive sensitivity to music styles from those cultures.
Bilingualism
Multilingualism
Multilingualism is the act of using, or promoting the use of, multiple languages, either by an individual speaker or by a community of speakers. Multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. Multilingualism is becoming a social phenomenon governed by the needs of...
typically confers specific preferences for the language of lyrics
Lyrics
Lyrics are a set of words that make up a song. The writer of lyrics is a lyricist or lyrist. The meaning of lyrics can either be explicit or implicit. Some lyrics are abstract, almost unintelligible, and, in such cases, their explication emphasizes form, articulation, meter, and symmetry of...
in a song. When monolingual (English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
-speaking) and bilingual (Spanish
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
- and English-speaking) sixth graders listened to the same song played in an instrumental, English, or Spanish version, ratings of preference showed that bilingual students preferred the Spanish version, while monolingual students more often preferred the instrumental version; the children's self-reported distraction was the same for all excerpts. Spanish (bilingual) speakers also identified most closely with the Spanish song. Thus, the language of lyrics interacts with a listener's culture and language abilities to affect preferences.
Emotion Recognition
The cue-redundancy model of emotion recognition in music differentiates between universal, structural auditory cues and culturally-bound, learned auditory cues (see schematic below).Psychophysical cues
Structural cues that span all musical traditions include dimensions such as pace (tempo), loudnessDynamics (music)
In music, dynamics normally refers to the volume of a sound or note, but can also refer to every aspect of the execution of a given piece, either stylistic or functional . The term is also applied to the written or printed musical notation used to indicate dynamics...
, and timbre
Timbre
In music, timbre is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices and musical instruments, such as string instruments, wind instruments, and percussion instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that determine the...
. Fast tempo, for example, is typically associated with happiness, regardless of a listener's cultural background.
Culturally-bound cues
Culture-specific cues rely on knowledge of the conventions in a particular musical tradition. A particular timbre may be interpreted to reflect one emotion by Western listeners and another emotion by Eastern listeners.Cue-redundancy model
According to the cue-redundancy model, individuals exposed to music from their own cultural tradition utilize both psychophysical and culturally-bound cues in identifying emotionality. Conversely, perception of intended emotion in unfamiliar music relies solely on universal, psychophysical properties. JapaneseJapanese people
The are an ethnic group originating in the Japanese archipelago and are the predominant ethnic group of Japan. Worldwide, approximately 130 million people are of Japanese descent; of these, approximately 127 million are residents of Japan. People of Japanese ancestry who live in other countries...
listeners accurately categorize angry, joyful, and happy musical excerpts from familiar traditions (Japanese and Western samples) and relatively unfamiliar traditions (Hindustani). Simple, fast melodies
Melody
A melody , also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity...
receive joyful ratings from these participants; simple, slow samples receive sad ratings, and loud, complex excerpts are perceived as angry. Strong relationships between emotional judgments and structural acoustic cues suggest the importance of universal musical properties in categorizing unfamiliar music.
When both Korean and American
Americans
The people of the United States, also known as simply Americans or American people, are the inhabitants or citizens of the United States. The United States is a multi-ethnic nation, home to people of different ethnic and national backgrounds...
participants judged the intended emotion of Korean folksongs, the American group’s identification of happy and sad songs was equivalent to levels observed for Korean listeners. Surprisingly, Americans exhibited greater accuracy in anger assessments than the Korean group. The latter result implies cultural differences in anger perception
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
occur independently of familiarity, while the similarity of American and Korean happy and sad judgments indicate the role of universal auditory cues
Hearing (sense)
Hearing is the ability to perceive sound by detecting vibrations through an organ such as the ear. It is one of the traditional five senses...
in emotional perception.
Categorization of unfamiliar music varies with intended emotion. Timbre mediates Western listeners’ recognition of angry and peaceful Hindustani songs. Flute
Flute
The flute is a musical instrument of the woodwind family. Unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is an aerophone or reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air across an opening...
timbre supports the detection of peace, whereas string
String instrument
A string instrument is a musical instrument that produces sound by means of vibrating strings. In the Hornbostel-Sachs scheme of musical instrument classification, used in organology, they are called chordophones...
timbre aids anger identification. Happy and sad assessments, on the other hand, rely primarily on relatively “low-level” structural information such as tempo
Tempo
In musical terminology, tempo is the speed or pace of a given piece. Tempo is a crucial element of any musical composition, as it can affect the mood and difficulty of a piece.-Measuring tempo:...
. Both low-level cues (e.g., slow tempo) and timbre aid in the detection of peaceful music, but only timbre cued anger recognition. Communication of peace, therefore, takes place at multiple structural levels, while anger seems to be conveyed nearly exclusively by timbre. Similarities between aggressive vocalizations and angry music (e.g., roughness) may contribute to the salience of timbre in anger assessments.
Complexity
Because musical complexity is a psychophysicalPsychophysics
Psychophysics quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they effect. Psychophysics has been described as "the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation" or, more completely, as "the analysis of perceptual...
dimension, the cue-redundancy model predicts that complexity is perceived independently of experience. However, South African and Finnish listeners assign different complexity ratings to identical African
African people
African people refers to natives, inhabitants, or citizen of Africa and to people of African descent.-Etymology:Many etymological hypotheses that have been postulated for the ancient name "Africa":...
folk songs. Thus, the cue-redundancy model may be overly simplistic in its distinctions between structural feature detection and cultural learning, at least in the case of complexity.
Repetition
When listening to music from within one’s own cultural tradition, repetition plays a key role in emotion judgments. American listeners who hear classicalClassical music
Classical music is the art music produced in, or rooted in, the traditions of Western liturgical and secular music, encompassing a broad period from roughly the 11th century to present times...
or jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
excerpts multiple times rate the elicited and conveyed emotion of the pieces as higher relative to participants who hear the pieces once.
Methodological limitations
Methodological limitations of previous studies preclude a complete understanding of the roles of psychophysical cues in emotion recognition. Divergent modeMusical mode
In the theory of Western music since the ninth century, mode generally refers to a type of scale. This usage, still the most common in recent years, reflects a tradition dating to the middle ages, itself inspired by the theory of ancient Greek music.The word encompasses several additional...
and tone
Pitch (music)
Pitch is an auditory perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.Pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,...
cues elicit “mixed affect,” demonstrating the potential for mixed emotional percepts. Use of dichotomous scales (e.g., simple happy/sad ratings) may mask this phenomenon, as these tasks require participants to report a single component of a multidimensional affective experience.
Memory
Enculturation is a powerful influence on music memory. Both long-termLong-term memory
Long-term memory is memory in which associations among items are stored, as part of the theory of a dual-store memory model. According to the theory, long term memory differs structurally and functionally from working memory or short-term memory, which ostensibly stores items for only around 20–30...
and working memory
Working memory
Working memory has been defined as the system which actively holds information in the mind to do verbal and nonverbal tasks such as reasoning and comprehension, and to make it available for further information processing...
systems are critically involved in the appreciation and comprehension of music. Long-term memory enables the listener to develop musical expectation based on previous experience while working memory is necessary to relate pitch
Pitch (music)
Pitch is an auditory perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.Pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,...
es to one another in a phrase, between phrases, and throughout a piece.
Neuroscience
Memory
In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....
for music is, at least in part, special and distinct from other forms of memory. The neural processes of music memory retrieval
Music information retrieval
Music information retrieval is the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music. MIR is a small but growing field of research with many real-world applications...
share much with the neural processes of verbal memory
Verbal memory
Verbal memory is a term used in Cognitive Psychology that refers to memory of words and other abstractions involving language.-Verbal Encoding:Verbal Encoding refers to the interpretation of verbal stimuli...
retrieval, as indicated by functional magnetic resonance imaging
Functional magnetic resonance imaging
Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI is a type of specialized MRI scan used to measure the hemodynamic response related to neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or other animals. It is one of the most recently developed forms of neuroimaging...
studies comparing the brain areas activated during each task. Both musical and verbal memory retrieval activate the left inferior frontal cortex, which is thought to be involved in executive function, especially executive function of verbal retrieval, and the posterior middle temporal cortex, which is thought to be involved in semantic retrieval. However, musical semantic retrieval also bilaterally activates the superior temporal gyri
Gyrus
A gyrus is a ridge on the cerebral cortex. It is generally surrounded by one or more sulci .-Notable gyri:* Superior frontal gyrus, lat. gyrus frontalis superior* Middle frontal gyrus, lat. gyrus frontalis medius...
containing the primary auditory cortex.
Memory for music
Enculturation
Enculturation is the process by which a person learns the requirements of the culture by which he or she is surrounded, and acquires values and behaviours that are appropriate or necessary in that culture. As part of this process, the influences which limit, direct, or shape the individual include...
has a pronounced effect on individuals' memory for music. Evidence suggests that people develop their cognitive understanding of music from their cultures. People are best at recognizing and remembering music in the style of their native culture, and their music recognition and memory is better for music from familiar but nonnative cultures than it is for music from unfamiliar cultures. Part of the difficulty in remembering culturally unfamiliar music may arise from the use of different neural processes when listening to familiar and unfamiliar music. For instance, brain areas involved in attention, including the right angular gyrus and middle frontal gyrus, show increased activity when listening to culturally unfamiliar music compared to novel but culturally familiar music.
Development
Enculturation affects music memory in early childhoodChildhood
Childhood is the age span ranging from birth to adolescence. In developmental psychology, childhood is divided up into the developmental stages of toddlerhood , early childhood , middle childhood , and adolescence .- Age ranges of childhood :The term childhood is non-specific and can imply a...
before a child’s cognitive schemata for music is fully formed, perhaps beginning at as early as one year of age. Like adults
Adult
An adult is a human being or living organism that is of relatively mature age, typically associated with sexual maturity and the attainment of reproductive age....
, children are also better able to remember novel music from their native culture than from unfamiliar ones, although they are less capable than adults at remembering more complex music.
Children’s developing music cognition may be influenced by the language of their native culture. For instance, children in English-speaking cultures develop the ability to identify pitches from familiar songs at 9 or 10 years old, while Japanese children develop the same ability at age 5 or 6. This difference may be due to the Japanese language’s use of pitch accents
Pitch accent
Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
, which encourages better pitch discrimination at an early age, rather than the stress accents upon which English relies.
Musical expectations
Enculturation also biases listeners' expectations such that they expect to hear tones that correspond to culturally familiar modalMusical mode
In the theory of Western music since the ninth century, mode generally refers to a type of scale. This usage, still the most common in recent years, reflects a tradition dating to the middle ages, itself inspired by the theory of ancient Greek music.The word encompasses several additional...
traditions. For example, Western participants presented with a series of pitches followed by a test tone not present in the original series were more likely to mistakenly indicate that the test tone was originally present if the tone was derived from a Western scale
Musical scale
In music, a scale is a sequence of musical notes in ascending and descending order. Most commonly, especially in the context of the common practice period, the notes of a scale will belong to a single key, thus providing material for or being used to conveniently represent part or all of a musical...
than if it was derived from a culturally unfamiliar scale.
Limits of enculturation
Despite the powerful effects of music enculturation, evidence indicates that cognitive comprehension of and affinity for different cultural modalities is somewhat plastic. One long-term instance of plasticity is bimusicalism, a musical phenomenon akin to bilingualism. Bimusical individuals frequently listen to music from two cultures and do not demonstrate the biases in recognition memoryRecognition memory
Recognition memory is a subcategory of declarative memory Essentially, recognition memory is the ability to recognize previously encountered events, objects, or people...
and perceptions
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
of tension displayed by individuals whose listening experience is limited to one musical tradition.
Other evidence suggests that some changes in music appreciation and comprehension can occur over a short period of time. For instance, after half an hour of passive exposure to original melodies
Melody
A melody , also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity...
using familiar Western pitches in an unfamiliar musical grammar
Chord progression
A chord progression is a series of musical chords, or chord changes that "aims for a definite goal" of establishing a tonality founded on a key, root or tonic chord. In other words, the succession of root relationships...
or harmonic structure (the Bohlen-Pierce scale
Bohlen-Pierce scale
The Bohlen–Pierce scale is a musical scale that offers an alternative to the octave-repeating scales typical in Western and other musics, specifically the diatonic scale. Compared with octave-repeating scales, its intervals are more consonant with certain types of acoustic spectra. It was...
), Western participants demonstrated increased recognition memory and greater affinity for melodies in this grammar. This suggests that even very brief exposure to unfamiliar music can rapidly affect music perception and memory.
See also
- Music CognitionMusic cognitionMusic cognition is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the mental processes that support musical behaviors, including perception, comprehension, memory, attention, and performance...
- Cognitive MusicologyCognitive musicologyCognitive musicology is a branch of Cognitive Science concerned with computationally modeling musical knowledge with the goal of understanding both music and cognition. More broadly, it can be considered the set of all phenomena surrounding computational modeling of musical thought and action...
- Embodied music cognitionEmbodied music cognitionEmbodied music cognition is a direction within systematic musicology interested in studying the role of the human body in relation to all musical activities....
- Music and the brainMusic and the brainMusic and the brain is the science that studies the neural mechanisms that underlie musical behaviours in humans and animals. These behaviours include music listening, performing, composing, reading, writing, and ancillary activities. It also is increasingly concerned with the brain basis for...
- Cognitive neuroscience of musicCognitive neuroscience of musicThe cognitive neuroscience of music is the scientific study of brain-based mechanisms involved in the cognitive processes underlying music. Methods include functional magnetic resonance imaging , transcranial magnetic stimulation , magnetoencephalography , electroencephalography , and positron...
- Music therapyMusic therapyMusic therapy is an allied health profession and one of the expressive therapies, consisting of an interpersonal process in which a trained music therapist uses music and all of its facets—physical, emotional, mental, social, aesthetic, and spiritual—to help clients to improve or maintain their...